What Happens in Columbine
by The MudDog
Summary: Dean never thought he'd stay someplace, never thought he'd meet someone who'd make him WANT to stay someplace (and definitely not in small-town nowhere). But then he meets Sam. It's not exactly love at first sight, but that doesn't mean it's not love... tough love. Unrelated Wincest. High school AU. Genderswap!Sam.
1. Welcome to Columbine

**Author Note: Hey y'all! I thought I should straighten several things out before jumping into this. First off, Columbine, Wisconsin is not a real town as far as I know. I've never been to Wisconsin, so I'm sorry if I get the atmosphere, flora and fauna wrong, but such is life. Second, I closed Sam and Dean's age gap to several months instead of several years to make everything work better. Sam and Dean are unrelated in this story, so technically this ain't Wincest 'cause there's no incest, but it will eventually be Sam/Dean and if that still bothers you, then I trust you to make your own safe choice about whether or not to read on. Finally and most importantly, I did not make Sam a girl (Samantha) because I have anything against them being gay together — there's only one Supernatural pairing I ship that isn't gay — but I really wanted to try writing Sam as a girl. ;)**

**Sorry for that very long statement… now on to the story.**

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CHAPTER 1: WELCOME TO COLUMBINE

I'd never been to Columbine before in my life, but I still got a strong sense of déjà vu when my dad and I rolled into town. There was this tiny square park (really just a lawn with a few trees and benches) surrounded by oldish-looking shops: diners, bookstores, town hall, a few clothing places for girls… It was like a mash-up of every other Midwestern town Dad and I'd ever hit, and I was bored of it before we reached the house. But hey, we had a house for once instead of some crap-ass motel room, so this job wasn't totally without perks. It wasn't even some shitty shack-type deal; when the Impala stopped, I found myself staring at a real house. Flower garden, rose bush tangled up the wall, gnomes, new paintjob and all. Seriously, a real fucking house.

"Dad," I said. "What is this?"

"It's where we're staying," he said, unhelpful as always.

"You serious? It looks like people still live here."

"They're out of town," Dad replied as he swooped off the driver's seat and around back to pop the trunk.

Huh. Well, that was totally cool with me. I had my own room. We had a working fridge, running water… Heck, we even had a fucking flat screen! After bringing everything in and making a full sweep of the place, I dropped onto the couch with an appreciative sigh. Jesus, the cushions were comfortable!

"Stand up, Dean," Dad ordered when he noticed. His thick lips tucked up into a frown. "We're not here to relax; we're on a job, and you know what that means."

I didn't actually. I mean, I had a general idea, but exactly what he wanted me to do right then and there? No clue. I wasn't a mind reader.

Apparently the blank look on my face said it all because Dad's scowl deepened. "Research," he growled and turned to walk into the kitchen. He'd made it to the archway where carpet switched to tile when he remembered something else and tacked on, "But don't stay up too late. You've got school tomorrow." He actually smiled when he said this, like he could hear the deafening vibrations of my mental groan.

Research and school? Forget the house; Columbine had been constructed by the devil as a personal hell.

Dad had already disappeared into the kitchen, but I couldn't help myself from trying, "You sure you don't need my help on the hunt?"

"If I needed it, I would've asked," the deep voice rumbled through the wall. "You're getting educated." There was a short pause before he added, "I mean that by the way. High school wasn't invented to pick up girls; you better be paying attention in class."

"Of course," I said, but I didn't spend too much energy trying to make my tone convincing. Come on… Dad didn't really expect me to try and work out what the hell was going on in all those random classes when we'd be packing up and hauling ass in just a week or two anyway. There was no way. So it seemed to me that the most productive use of my time in the educational system was, in fact, to pick up girls, and that's exactly what I intended to do.

…

After completing the two-mile walk to school — Dad had laughed when I'd asked if I could borrow the car — I was confronted by a set of crisp brick structures on the side of the road. They seemed to be screaming "preppy" at the top of their peach-pink lungs and I couldn't help but make a face. Well crap. Frowning at the neat metal doors of the administrative building that I was going to have to enter in a few minutes, I turned instead to scan the flow of students slogging their way across the central quad. It was still early autumn, not so cold that the girls who wanted to couldn't wear those cute little shorts that just begged you to stare at their asses, and, well, who was I to deny such pretty pleas? Some of the blue-jean babes were doing decently themselves, and even a few of the chicks who'd given in to the prep of their surroundings and wore plaid skirts managed to make prude look pretty hot.

My eyes followed the neat side-to-side twitches of a pair of daisy dukes up the stairs to the largest building, and then, once they'd disappeared inside, trailed a nicely fitted shirt down the same staircase. After that I switched to watching the animated shivers of some girl's long blond curls until I decided I really couldn't delay going inside any longer, and, with a sigh and a little jerk of my backpack, trudged over to the smug brick building.

"Hello how can I help you," the middle-aged woman at the front desk recited as I stepped up. Her mouth was creased in a dull line and the look she gave me was the same look older people always give youth-culture things like rap and graffiti. "Fuckin' kids," it seemed to say. I never understood why people like that worked in schools, but hey, maybe employment options were pretty slim around here.

I arranged my mouth into a close-lipped smile. "I'm new," I told her, bending down to rest my elbows on the edge of her desk. "S'posed to come here to get my schedule?"

Her dead eyes gave me a totally non-plussed look and she dragged her hand over to open a filing drawer as if I'd asked her to clean up some kid's barf. After fingering through half the folders and narrowing in on her prey, she smacked it down onto the stretch of wood between us and snapped it open.

"Winchester. Dean," she read off the top sheet. God, the woman's voice was flatter than ten-year-old tonic water.

"That's me," I confirmed.

Her nub-tipped fingers flicked the sheet across the surface towards me. "That's your schedule. Welcome to Columbine High."

I slid off her desk with the paper in hand. "Thanks," I said, praying to God that not everybody in the whole damn town was like Mrs. Zombie-Mom there. After just eighteen hours in Columbine, I was already bored out of my mind, and if the people were as dull as the place, then I might as well shoot myself in the head and go to the real Hell, where at least _something_ happened.

But I didn't have to wait long for things to heat up. First period was twelfth-grade English with one Mr. Lang, who didn't notice me walk in late and slip into the outer circle of desks. I slouched down and half-listened to what was going on — some sort of debate or discussion thingy — with all the girls in an inner ring of desks and all the dudes around them. Weird. But hey, it seemed like only the chicks were allowed to talk for now, so that was a plus as far as I was concerned.

"I think it's symbolic of race relations," a girl across the circle was saying, "how we — I mean white people — dug black people into a hole. Like, metaphorically. Since it takes place in like the thirties or something—"

"Twenties," a different chick corrected.

"—Twenties, whatever," chick number one continued with an acknowledging nod towards her editor. "So it being about race makes a lot of sense because it was like… bad for black people then."

"Yeah," another girl broke in. She was sitting up really straight with her legs tightly crossed. One of the skirt-wearing girls. "—but just because it was written by a black woman doesn't mean everything in it is about race. To me it seems like she's trying to make a more universal point about how humanity craves destruction—"

"Sure," girl one cut in, "but we're just talking about the hole right now—"

"Exactly," preppy girl said, reasserting her position as speaker. "Didn't you notice the way they dug the hole? They didn't just dig it; they tore up the grass and the dirt. It was a very violent act. Anyway, since both of the people digging it were black, I don't think it makes much sense to say it's about white people metaphorically burying black people."

"I think we should be looking at this through a homoerotic lens," a new voice drawled over the others.

I could feel the collective eye roll that swept around the room.

"You think we should look at _everything_ through a homoerotic lens," the first chick said with a less-than-subtle sigh. "Newsflash: not all literature is about sex."

"But this totally is," the drawler insisted, although the lagging pace of her voice still seemed to indicate that she didn't care all that much. "Two girls digging a _hole_ together with _sticks_? And then they break the sticks? And then bury the evidence? What part of that doesn't say forbidden lesbian love?"

"The part earlier on where they're talking about how much they like the boys staring at them, maybe? They're not lesbian."

"I agree with Raina," yet another chick stuck in. "Not about them being lesbian—" she shot a small, apologetic smile at the drawly girl. "—but about it being about sex. And I think that actually goes along with Caroline's violence idea." She nodded towards the preppy redhead. "If we're primarily looking at this through a deconstruction lens, then it makes sense she'd be putting sex — love — and violence — hate — together to show that they're not really polar opposites at all. Like, hate and love are actually interlaced and you can't ever love someone without also hating them. Something along those lines."

"Exactly," the skirt-wearing girl, Caroline, nodded, like this had been her ultimate message all along.

The first speaker allowed her head to tip forward in recognition, but said, "I think Sam has a point, but I still think that Morrison's, like, overarching goal had to do with deconstructing race, too, and I'm not convinced that the hole has nothing to do with it…"

…And I realized that I must be in the wrong class. Fuck, those chicks were smart! I mean, I had no clue what book they were talking about, but the way they were talking about it was giving me chills — so snappy back and forth, like their brains never stopped spinning, like they were hiding golden treasure troves inside their skulls. I mean, not like I'd ever say this out loud, but I dug smart chicks, and before I made myself look like an idiot in front of a whole room full of them, I had to get out.

So I raised my hand.

The conversation stopped instantly. Everybody turned to look at me. I could feel the brain power focused up behind all those pairs of different-colored eyes, all focused on me now.

"Are you in this class?" Mr. Lang asked, seemingly more surprised than anything. The look he gave me from his watery brown eyes wasn't entirely self-confident, like it was possible I could've been his student and he just hadn't noticed over the course of the past month.

"Uh, I'm not sure," I swallowed. Everybody's eyes were crawling over my skin like little creepy critters. "I'm new, and I thought my schedule said to be here, but…"

Mr. Lang slid out of his hunkered position on his stool and tottered over to me. He was a tiny dude, like the wind could blow him over, and I felt like maybe I should be meeting him halfway to spare him the effort, but before I could do more than straighten my back, he was there, hand out-held. "Can I see your schedule?"

"Sure." I released the paper into his wiry-fingered grasp, carefully not looking around the room. Shy wasn't one of my emotions usually — ever, really — but I felt out of place knowing that all the kids around me were, like, fifty times smarter, so for once, shyness it was.

"Ah," the teacher said, prompting me to look up. "It's just the room number that's wrong. Mr. Lang and I decided to switch." The man — who apparently wasn't Mr. Lang — tugged a pen out of his pocket and bent over my desk. "I'm Mr. McDonnel, and this is AP Lit. You want to go to this room." He slid the paper back across the desk towards me with a small smile. "Sorry for the confusion. I can write you a note if you'd like… to explain why you're late."

"That's okay," I said, scooping up my stuff as quickly as I could without losing my outward cool. "I'd've been late anyway." I shot him a quick upturn of my lips in thanks, and then scooted my ass out of there. Leave the geeks to their geeking; I was gonna find some people on my own level.


	2. Of Books and Bitches

CHAPTER 2: OF BOOKS AND BITCHES

"I want you at the library."

I hadn't even gotten my second foot through the door, so it was with a grumble that I said, "Hello to you too, Dad," and swung my backpack onto the floor.

Dad either didn't hear or just didn't care because he kept his eyes glued to the tattered pages of his journal as he strode slowly across the living room towards me. "You're looking for lore on Porewit. Slavic god. Gotta know how to kill the bastard."

He still hadn't looked up, so I allowed myself a rare and much-deserved eye-roll.

"I felt that," Dad said.

"Felt what?"

"You know damn well what; I have a nose for attitude," he growled, focus still aimed downward at his own scrawled notes. "Now hit the road and get your reading on."

"Porewit?" I repeated, doing my best to only send out vibes of innocence and complacency. "Spelled how?"

"Like it's pronounced," he said, as if that actually helped at all, "And don't come back 'til you've got good news for me."

Wondering what had happened to yesterday's early bedtime speech, and how it was we'd had an entire conversation without once making eye-contact, I executed a one-eighty-degree spin back out the door and saluted a, "Yes, sir," to the garden gnome hiding in the sage bush. Man, Dad sure knew how to put the hominess in home. On top of that, he had to know this was a goose chase. I mean, seriously… town with two- maybe three-thousand people? And he really thought the library was gonna have stocked up on ancient Slavic lore books? No fucking way. Absolutely no fucking way. He just wanted me out of the house for one of his own mysterious, I'm-the-adult-so-don't-ask-questions reasons. Well, fine… let him have his secrets. I'd just have to start looking for a comfortable doorstep to spend the night on, then.

…

The library, when I arrived, was actually a decent-looking piece of work… for a place of learning, I mean. Brick like the school, but older and somehow less self-important. Less clean, I guess. Less shiny red. It rested on the north side of the tiny park, lounging in the shade of two very large, orange-leaved beech trees. They hung over the roof like sleeping sentinels, a little bit creepy, sure, but not half as bad as I'd expected. At least it had dignity.

The town must not've been big on reading, though, 'cause the entrance was fucking impossible to find. I made two full circuits around the place (lawn and trees on three sides, little picket-fence garden on the last) before giving up. There was a door near the back corner that had a flight of narrow metal stairs leading up to it. A big, white and red, rectangular sticker clearly marked it as an exit, but screw it; since when had I been Mr. Straight-and-Narrow? So I marched straight up.

"Oh, shut it," I said as the metal creaked disapprovingly, like it was trying to rat me out or something. With the dying groans of the last step, I pulled out my pick set and got down to business. Nobody worried about all those punk-ass kids trying to break into libraries, so it wasn't a complicated lock, and I'd popped it in under twenty seconds. Twenty seconds, dude. I mean: was I awesome or was I awesome? Tucking the picks away with a smug flick of my wrist, I spun into the room, only to come to an abrupt halt under the disapproving, purse-lipped look of a narrowed pair of dark hazel eyes, which seemed almost like an extension of the library itself.

It was the back of the room, pocketed off by shelves, shelves, and more shelves, so the frowning chick was the only person who'd seen. She looked a teensy bit familiar, too, but I wasn't sure why.

Shooting her my A-grade, don't-mind-me smile, I said, "Only door I could find."

"It's downstairs," she replied, lips still puckered up like one of those porcelain China dolls — only no porcelain doll had ever had as big of a stick up its ass as this girl — but hey, what did I expect from a chick who spent her days alone in a library?

Like the brilliant person that I was, I said, "What is?"

She rolled her eyes and let her lips blow open in a sigh too quiet to hear. "The door, genius. You go through the garden and then there's a staircase down to the door."

"Seems a bit complicated," I shrugged. "You guys tryna establish some sort of elite class structure here? Keep the commoners out?"

She raised a thin eyebrow and pushed the dark chestnut mane out of her face. "Only the ones who are too stupid to find the door."

"I found a door!" I protested. Wasn't she at least a little impressed that I'd picked the lock? I mean, come on; there are different types of knowledge, right?

But I guess not in this chick's opinion 'cause she just snorted and turned back to the bookshelf she'd evidently been perusing before my arrival… That's when I recognized her. Girl + Books + Smart-ass = AP Lit screw-up. She was one of _those_ girls… not that I remembered which one. Huh. Well, screw Miss Intelligence and her fancy literature and her fancy-ass doors; I had more important things to do… divine god things. So there!

Totally unaware of my sock-rockin' mental comeback, the girl kept on sliding her eyes and fingers over the row of books in front of her, gaze and hand moving in perfect synchrony like they were attached by puppet strings or something. Or maybe like one of those fake psychic readers, with their eyes closed in concentration and their fingers wiggling in the invisible void in a way that was meant to say, "I'm sensing things; can't you see?" Mrs. Door Police here had her eyes open, but she was still giving off those hyper-focused, you'll-never-fully-understand-me vibes. With big, dreamy eyes like that, she could totally pull it off, too. Get the dusky make-up going, maybe a little tattoo on her shoulder… definitely lose the clothes… She could rival Faye Dunaway.

I realized I was smirking at her back, which was weird, and she'd probably noticed and decided I was, like, stalking her or something, which I totally wasn't, and since I didn't want to give her any wrong impressions, I decided it was time to go. Time to find a librarian and, like Dad'd said: "get my reading on."

After blundering about between various aisles for a couple minutes, I managed to locate the staircase going down. Turned out, of course, that there _was_ a door below decks: one that didn't have a giant DO NOT ENTER, EXIT, or AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY sign over it. Huh. I still thought Book Girl and the rest of the town nerd squad must've made an extra effort to hide it. But hey, screw them; I'd found it now. I'd found the check-out desk, too, and I sauntered up to the little old lady perched behind it with a lopsided smile and a totally suave, "Hi."

I was the only person in the joint, so the round-faced librarian had been eye-stalking me from the second I'd hit basement-level. Still, her wrinkled lips folded into a smile full of apple pie and crocheted mittens when I made the formal (or, fine, not so formal) salutation. With her close-cut gray hair and that type of rectangular glasses that are so skinny you just gotta wonder how anyone can actually see through them, she looked just like everybody's great aunt, and when she said, "Hello," she sounded like one, too. "How can I help you?"

"Well," I said, "this might be a bit of a stretch, but I'm lookin' for some books on Slavic mythology. You wouldn't happen to have anything like that, would you?"

"Hmm." Her lips tucked into a pursed expression, a helluva lot like Nerd-Chick's… but more thoughtful, less bitchy. "My guess would be 'no,' but it's always a good idea to check." She dropped off her stool with a little puff and circled around the chunky piece of furniture to get on my side, indicating with a curl of her palm for me to follow. "It would be in the religious section probably. Second floor."

Turned out she meant the floor I'd just come from, which was bad because it also turned out that the religious section was right where Miss I'm-So-Sophisticated was browsing, and, of course — because my luck is like crap… only worse, you know — she was still there.

"Oh hello, Sam, dear," the librarian lady beamed.

The girl, Sam I suppose, glanced up with an answering smile. She avoided showing teeth, but managed to still pull off the genuine-look. Guess her lips were just too in love with themselves to break apart. "Hey, Mrs. Oswald," she said.

"Well, this is wonderful," the librarian, Mrs. Oswald, continued. Her great-aunt, gingerbread, lace-doyly-type beam embodied all the joyful thoughts that I (and no doubt Sam too) were _not_ feeling. And I mean _really_ not. "Well crap," was more along the line of my mental train. And the smile Sam had so graciously bestowed upon her when she'd first turned up was going flaccid. It looked like she'd swallowed something really gross and now couldn't decide whether to throw it up or just pretend it'd never happened. Fuckin' fantastic.

Mrs. Oswald turned back to me with the same sugar-coated smile, like she was totally oblivious to our lukewarm — definitely leaning towards the cold side — reception. "Sam will be much more helpful than me," she pressed on with sincere sweetness. "She's read all the mythology books in the whole county."

"Not yet," Sam smiled back, the courtesy straining a bit thin as her cheeks took on a vague bubble-gum hue.

Mrs. Oswald shook her head affectionately at the geek chick and beckoned me forward with one little old-lady hand. "What's your name, young man?"

With an unhappy glance up at Sam, I mumbled, "Uh… Dean."

"First time at the library, Dean?"

Her eyes were so thrilled to have a new convert into the fold that I tried to put a little more enthusiasm into my voice as I said, "Yep. Guess I'm a library virgin."

Sam rolled her eyes and her lips popped open in another one of those too-quiet-to-hear sighs, like she was too high-class to make audible noises of disapproval.

"Wonderful," Mrs. Oswald beamed again. "Well, Dean, this is Sam, and she's a—" _Library slut_, I thought, unable to prevent the tiny smirk this called to my face. "—regular here," the librarian completed, unable to pick up on my cruder — but also more amusing — brain waves.

When Sam finally took the cue to say, "Hi, Dean," it was like she was reading off of a bad script.

"Hia Sammy," I said, shooting her a grin that was way too broad to be genuine.

She allowed herself a sharp glare in my direction, doll-lips all tightened up, eyes darkening, eyebrows clenching, before the librarian turned back her way and she quickly flipped her expression into something more pleasant and less judgmental.

"Sam, why don't you show Dean around and help him find his book this first time?"

"Of course," Sam said, reading the next line on her invisible script. If there was one thing she'd never be, it was an actor. I snorted.

They both glanced up at me, Sam with another glare, Mrs. Oswald with a more timid and slightly confused smile. But she still said, "Wonderful," one last time. "I'll leave you two to it then."

She did, little grandma behind disappearing around the end of the aisle only moments later, so that me and the Sam girl were alone, slouching into a tepid pool of silence. Seriously… this sucked-ass.

"Look," I said. I drew up the corners of my mouth. "You go back to being Anne of Green Gables, and I'll deal with my own crap, Capiche?"

"Don't be stupid," she snorted. "I help you; it goes faster; you get out of my hair. It makes more sense that way."

Well… when she put it like that… "Deal."

She held out a hand to shake on it. Seriously? I took it gingerly and we made one quick thrusting motion up and down before zapping our hands back to our sides. I was probably absorbing uncoolness, or weirdness at least, just by being in a five-meter radius of her, but hey, maybe I could get a little brain juice too.

"So what are you looking for," she demanded brusquely, setting down the stack of books she'd collected so she could dig her hands into her hips. "Greek? Norse?"

"Slavic," I said. "Like, Norway or something."

She rolled her eyes. "You're confusing Slavic with Scandinavian. If you want Norway it's Norse. Slavic is Eastern Europe."

"Yeah, well, thanks for geography 101," I said, "but I really just wanna know if you've got the books."

She sighed — out loud this time. Guess I must've pushed the bitch button. "It depends on what you're looking for," she said with an impatient tap of her foot. Her eyes dug into mine as her mouth continued to shrivel in on itself, getting all nice and tiny and prune-like. I wondered how long she could keep it up before all traces of lip disappeared and all that was left was a puckered little dot where her mouth used to be. "—Did you really mean Slavic, or did you mean Norse?"

"Slavic."

"Then no. Not exactly mainstream, is it? Either use the computers or put in an order for a book to be transferred from another library." And with that, she bent down to scoop her books up again.

"Geez," I muttered as she swept away, "What'd I ever do to you?" …Bitch.

I wrinkled my nose at her departing back, copying the disgusted face she'd been making just moments before. And only then, as the last strands of that mat of dark hair flipped around the end of the bookshelf, did what cookie-cutter librarian lady'd said really hit me. Angry, loner, smart girl who was renting up all the mythology books in the county? Seem, I don't know, just a little suspicious? Anyone wonder what the hell she was doing with them? 'Cause I sure did, and I was thinking that maybe Dad and I should be putting a new suspect on our radar.


	3. Watching the Witch

**Hey y'all. I know I advertised this as a Sam/Dean story, and I promise that that _will_ come, but it's gonna take a few more chapters probably (possibly more than a few)... so my apologies if you're waiting.**

**I also wanted to thank my very first reviewer on any of my stories so far. You rock, coldkagome!  
**

**That's all. Hope you like the chapter!**

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CHAPTER 3: WATCHING THE WITCH

"Of all the girls in this hell hole, you're into Samantha Tucker? For real?"

"What? No!" I said, forcing my eyebrows into a scandalized scrunch. "No."

My new buddy, Robert, hoisted up his own strawberry-blonde brows in disbelief. He was smirking, the bastard. "Really? Because you've been staring at her for the past half-hour."

"Fuck you, man. I have not." Which was true. I had _not_ been _staring_ at her; I'd been subtly glancing from time to time… and it wasn't like I was checking out her boobs or anything. It was my new homework assignment: watch the witch — the potential witch, anyway.

"Good," Robert said, letting his smirk simmer. "You wouldn't know, but it's common knowledge in the hive that Sam there—" He inclined his head across the quad at her back without turning to look. "—does _not_ date."

I allowed a short "Huh," to puff between my lips, though I totally wasn't surprised. She struck me as the feminazi, all-dudes-are-idiots type, and even if I was wrong there and it was just me she hated, I mean, who the hell would wanna deal with that much PMS twenty-four seven? (I wasn't quite over Monday's library incident). Still, I could tell Robert was digging for it, so I gave in and asked, "Why not?"

"Well," he began as he leaned in and dropped his voice, like this was some huge-ass secret or something, "She got dumped end of last year. By Taylor Carreau—" He slid his hand across the table dismissively. "—another brainiac. I don't have anything personal against him, but it was way fucked-up how he did it. There was this class seminar about a week before finals, in history or something… totally unrelated… but they started going at it." He paused and then admitted, "I wasn't there," with a little shrug, "but I know a lot of people who were, and apparently Taylor just started yelling about how she was too sensitive and closed-off and I don't know what else, but a lot of messed up shit. And this is all in front of the whole fucking class, right? And then he dumps her." He dropped his shoulders with a small head-shake. "One fucking week before finals. Who does that?"

"You got me," I said, eyes going through him as I tried to process the influx of — admittedly kinda interesting — intel. "Sounds like this Taylor guy's just a douche."

"Yeah, but not really," Robert said. "He's usually pretty cool; it was just this one thing. Of course, since the whole school knows about it now, he's just as far out of the dating game as Sam. No chick in her right mind's gonna risk a repeat experience."

"Karma sucks," I nodded with a dry twitch of my lips, but I couldn't really focus on the conversation. I mean, maybe Bitch Witch had her reasons for being… well, for being a bitch… but what was really spiking my interest were the little things. Like, the asshole boyfriend saying she was "closed-off," and how he now scored an absolute zero on the sex-appeal scale. 'Cause if this was a witchy thing, then secretive and vindictive totally fit the bill, and Dad had agreed with me that this _could_ very well be a witchy thing.

My eyes honed in on the distant chestnut mop. Right now it was swinging about as its owner talked to a group of chicks — probably a harem of other nerds — and, although I couldn't see her face, the way her shoulders were shaking seemed like laughter. Huh. Not through-and-through evil maybe, but hey, witches were people. They could still have friends and do math and all that crap. They could blend in and act all hormonal and normal like some seriously sly sons-of-bitches… But Dad and I were good — Shit, we were awesome! — and she wasn't going to get away as easy as she thought.

As if she could read my thoughts, Sam turned and caught me staring (more like glaring, really), but instead of making a bitch-face or stomping over to explain what was what, her eyebrows and mouth just crinkled a bit, kinda confused-looking, and she glanced away. Like that wasn't weird enough, I thought I detected an extra touch of pinkness scamper up the back of her neck, like she was embarrassed or something. Huh. Well, I was gonna have to keep watching her; that was for sure.

"Don't fuck with me," Robert snorted with another smirk cracking onto his baby-ass-white face, "You're not staring at her?"

"Fuck you, man," I said again, but I couldn't really deny it this time, so I just shot him a goofy grin and hoped he wouldn't spread the word too far. If there was one thing I didn't want, it was for Sam fucking Tucker to start thinking I liked her _like that_. That would suck some serious ass. "I'm watching, not creeping."

"Whatever," Robert grinned back, shaking his head. "Just letting you know what everyone else does; she's off the playing field."

Fine with me. I'd just spotted a cute (although kinda spindly) brunette high-tailing it out of the math and science building, and from the way she was jutting out her chest, I suspected that she was very much _on_ the playing field.

…

Six days later, I let Dad know just how bad he was killing my social life, but — no surprise — he wasn't taking my crap. No, dear old Dad was busy following up different leads, and, in his words, "It's good for you to learn to work a case alone," which really just meant I was stuck tailing Miss Mensa Witch for the rest of the week. And I don't mean keep an eye out at lunch; I mean full on stalking. I had to follow the bitch everywhere (except when I was in class), and, let me tell you, it wasn't a whole lotta fun. Actually… forget that; it flat out sucked.

"Heya Sam," the owner of one of the town's two bookstores called out as the tinkling of the bell announced her arrival.

As soon as the words had left his mouth, I was overcome by the urge to rip the smile off of his stupid pink face. I wanted to smash the cheerily ringing bell into tiny pieces. I wanted to tear all the pages out of the novel I was pretending to read slowly and painfully so I could hear the paper scream. Why did everybody in this whole fucking town have to be so goddamn in love with Samantha Tucker?

"Hi, Mr. Beattie," she said, exactly like she'd said to Ms. O'Neill yesterday… or Ms. Walterscheid the day before… or the Raitz brothers the day before that. And she smiled the same smile, too: one side of her mouth pulling up more than other, but not so much that she showed teeth, letting a single dimple form. I swear, if I saw that smile one more time I was gonna punch it down her throat. It was like she'd duped all of Columbine into believing she was some sort of fucking angel. Everywhere she went it was: "Hi, Sam… Oh, hello, Sam… How's your mother, Sam?... How's school going, Sam?... You're such a sweetheart, Sam… Ah, Sam, you're too funny…" Well, I didn't see anything funny about it! A fucking nuisance is what Sam was, because, apparently, I was the only person who didn't like her, and it was making me feel like an asshole, which totally wasn't fair because she was the one who'd been super freakin' rude when we'd met. Okay, maybe I hadn't been the picture of politeness either, but she'd totally started it.

As I stood there, fighting the voice in the back of my head that was rooting for me to start flinging books off the shelves, the owner, Mr. Beattie, was telling Sam, "After you came in asking about that herb encyclopedia last month, I ordered a copy." The guy's face swelled with essence of sunshine — or, like, baby deer, or something equally disgusting — as he beamed across the room at Bitch Chick. His hands folded and unfolded and folded again on the countertop, and then he gave up and tucked them behind his back. "It showed up yesterday," he continued eagerly, "so I've been waiting for you to come in."

"You did?" Sam said. The gummy green spots popped out of her eyes, and she evidently decided that, for just a second or two, her teeth could go on display. I noticed that they were kinda crooked, but Mr. Beattie didn't seem to. "It's here?" Sam went on, and, when Mr. Beattie nodded, added, "Can I see it?"

"Of course," the owner said, now aiming his smile down at the counter, like he was kinda embarrassed or something… but obviously still super pleased with himself for getting Sam to show off both dimples. "That's why I got it, isn't it?"

Seriously? I mean, not like Sam was an outcast at Columbine High or anything, but she definitely wasn't on top of the dog-pile. She had a good number of friends, but she wasn't going to be voted Prom Queen anytime soon, you know? But here, with the adults? Every freakin' one of them seemed to be her BFF. Mr. Beattie sure thought he was. Like a duck going tail-up, he dipped down under the counter to tug out the ratty old piece of crap — a book according to him, although that's totally not what I would've guessed if I'd seen it out of context — that Sam apparently couldn't wait to get her grubby hands on.

The two of them hunched over the counter together, staring at the rotten mass with worship in their eyes.

Mr. Beattie broke the silence first. "I could only get it secondhand," he whispered, like they were in a church or a museum or something. And then, as if he'd just noticed what a sorry sucker the encyclopedia really was, he tagged on, "Or fifth or sixth-hand probably… maybe twentieth. I really don't think they're printing this anymore."

"They're not," Sam breathed. She reached out with splayed fingers like she wanted to stroke the cover but then drew back. Again I couldn't help imagining her as a psychic, leaning over her crystal ball with big hoop earrings and a scarf on her head… but no, not a psychic… a witch. I mean, an encyclopedia of herbs? Really? What the hell could any normal seventeen-year-old possibly want with a century-old book on plants that was so close to death I could practically hear it begging to be shot? Pretty dry reading material on its own. Not good for much either.

Sam tore her eyes away from the decayed binding. "How much does it cost?"

"Twenty dollars," Mr. Beattie said.

This called for the return of the China-doll pursed lips. "Don't be stupid," she said, "I can do math. You must've paid at least twice as much for the book itself, and that's without shipping. How much does it actually cost?"

"Twenty-_five_ dollars," Mr. Beattie smiled, eyes sparkling up at the girl. "Don't pretend you're rich. Just call it an early birthday present."

"My birthday's not for seven months," Sam protested.

"So I won't get you one on the actual date," the man shrugged. He nudged the book towards her side of the counter. "It's never a bad time for a birthday present."

Sam shook her head at him, lips still puckered up, but she was obviously pleased, and she slipped her backpack off to get out the money.

Well, I was about to throw up. All this Donna Reed, perfect-world crap was making me nauseous — like, literally about to puke — and I was contemplating leaving off for the day and spending some quality time drowning myself in hand sanitizer when something in the bitch's bag caught my eye. She'd unzipped the outer pouch to grab her wallet, and although she sealed it back up pretty quick, it wasn't quick enough to stop someone as awesome as me from getting a good, clear look. Oh yes, I got a very good look, and the wallet wasn't the only thing in there. Nope. Smack dab center, all tied up and innocent-looking, was a cute little hex baggy.

"Ha!" I smirked to myself as I relished the sweet, sweet taste of success, "Got you now, bitch," and without wasting a second — because I really was gonna hurl if I watched any more of their dewy-eyed small talk — I hauled ass out of there to go have some serious talk with dear old Dad.


	4. And You Call Yourself a Hunter

CHAPTER 4: AND YOU CALL YOURSELF A HUNTER

When I thought back on it, I realized that Ms. Wu had told us the week before that we'd be working with the advanced biology class when we did the heart dissection, but I guess I'd been too busy working my magic on the lovely Gina Andrews to really get the message into my head. I mean, who'd've thought it would be big news anyway? I could handle a class period with the geeks. Most of them were alright. What I had a harder time handling was when Ms. Wu's tiny hand pulled open the door to usher in the advanced class and the fourth person through was accompanied by that fucking mat of dark hair, which, trust me, by this point I was ready to cut off and use as a mop for the rest of forever. See how pretty it was then! Ha! It would also make a pretty decent scrub brush: thick, just the right-coarseness, smelled kinda nice… like a carnival: kettle corn, windy air, and sugar… I mean, not that I'd really smelled it, of course.

By that point, I was frowning at the chalkboard. When they announced our partners and Ms. Wu called out in her tinny voice, "Dean and Samantha" …Well, then I was finding it just a little bit hard to stop myself from driving the lab kit's scalpel into the very center of the sheep heart we were going to be dissecting. Too bad basically all the blood was gone; a good squelch would've been really satisfying right about then. Sam, big surprise, looked just as thrilled as I did. She blew out a quick puff that sent her bangs flapping up like a hot air vent, and then stalked over with long, purposeful strides.

I turned away to catch Gina Andrews's eyes across the room. She noticed and beamed back with a finger flipping up to curl around a strand of sandy hair. I raised my eyebrows at her and shot her a grin of my own like we were the only two people in the room. Shameless flirting was way more up my alley than geek people. Still, because my senses are super fucking sharp and I'm just awesome like that, I knew Sam had reached the table and was standing only a few feet away, but I pretended like I hadn't noticed and waited for her to get tired of the game first. Finally, she did.

"Hi, Dean," she interrupted, voice flat.

Like I had all the time in the world, I turned back to face her and noticed that her lips were already beginning to suck inwards. I mean, seriously? I hadn't even said anything yet!

I nodded in return. No greeting, but I did suavely put in, "No offense, but I don't think I really need your help with this one."

"No?" Sam's eyes flicked after mine across the room to where Gina's pretty little ass was scooted up on her metal stool. "Cut open a lotta hearts in your time?"

My eyebrows pulled down and I frowned at her, unsure if there was supposed to be some double meaning to that that I wasn't getting or if she really had meant it as straightforward as that. Finally, deciding that, what the hell, I'd walk into the trap if there was one, I said, "Yeah. I have."

And sure enough, a very dry smile tugged up one side of her mouth, which was fucking infuriating. What did I miss? Freakin' smartass, that's what she was, but she was going down soon enough.

"Fine," she said as she tugged up the other stool, not even trying to dull the screech of the metal legs across the floor tiles. "Cool with me. I'll just sit here and let you handle it."

I tried to hide my deepening frown. "Good," I said, and nodded to emphasize the point.

Of course, freaky Miss Witch had undoubtedly seen her share of hearts, too, and probably, being the industrious little scientist that she was, made a closer study of them than I had, but I still couldn't help myself from trying to get her to flinch as I cut through the thinner portion of the muscle to open up the right atrium. She stared at the heart levelly. Fine. Time to kick it up a notch. I stuck my finger through the superior Vena Cava to push out one of the few remaining blood clots. It slumped in a dark, glistening mass on the tip of my glove, oozing paler liquids down the blue latex sides. She glanced up with the word, "Seriously?" written all over the hazel of her irises. I just flashed my own eyebrows at her in return and set in to hacking the right ventricle open.

She wrinkled her nose. "Very mature. You do realize you're supposed to be a scientist, not a butcher."

I continued with my animated hacking, and only when I was finished looked up to say, "You want a turn then?"

Her mouth puckered. At last she said, "Sure," and reached out to grab the heart. Once it was firmly clutched and bleeding in her talons, she turned her eyes upon it with a look that could've shot through a bulletproof vest, and by that I mean seriously fucking intense. Noticing something, her lips cinched up even tighter, like a drawstring bag she was determined not to let me see inside. "You cut through the septum," she said. "You weren't supposed to do that yet."

Like hell I wasn't! Anything that got Ms. Perfect's granny panties in a twist was totally, one-hundred-percent, fucking certainly something I was supposed to be doing. I stretched my lips into a simpering smirk to let her know just how I felt about the septum situation and watched as her eyebrows snapped down in response.

Snatching the scalpel off the tray with a stupid little flourish, she set down to carving up that heart nice and slow. The juices of life splattered out of it onto the slick gray surface of the lab table, and it let out a last-gasp, please-no, suctioning sound as she slipped the blade out — Schlooop! — and then back in. Slow, but with relish. When I caught the itsy-bitsy, teensy-weensy twist of her mouth as she dragged the knife through the whimpering cardiac muscle, I knew she was doing exactly what I'd been doing when I had the heart — trying to make me wince. Well, I had news for her: no fucking way was a little nip-n-tuck gonna get me green-faced. Like I hadn't seen it all before. Smirking, I stared back with a challenge and then pointedly shifted my gaze down to focus directly on the sheep's heart, which was begging for mercy under the ruthless hands of its torturer.

That's when Ms. Wu walked by to check in, and Sam, a little blush creeping up her cheeks, instantly flipped back to dealing with the dissection in an entirely professional fashion. However, the interruption also caused me to glance up for the first time since Sam and I'd gotten into our flinching war, and I realized that we had an audience. A few of the tables around us had stopped their own labs to watch the unfolding carnage. The bug-eyed blonde girl who was working with Robert looked a little sick, but for his part, my good friend Robby was just smirking at the two of us... the bastard. Dave Brooke was laughing like a hyena, not caring about the disgusted look his freckle-faced lab partner shot his way in response.

Sam noticed, too, and she pushed her lips further together. For once, though, I didn't think it was because she wanted to be a complete bitch; there was something about the way that her gaze dipped quickly to the table top that made me think maybe, just maybe, the witch was hiding a smile. And for some reason that thought had _me_ smiling. What can I say? I'm just a deeply caring person and happiness blossoms like a tulip in my soul when other people are happy.

"Guess you know your way around the heart, huh?" I said, 'cause for some stupid reason, my mouth decided it was a good time to open up. As soon as the damn sentence was out, my brain let my mouth know just how wrong it had been.

"Ruminant hearts, anyways," she said, and though she didn't take it back, suddenly the way her lips were wrinkled up didn't seem to be hiding a smile.

Cheesy bitch. No way in hell was I following the conversation along _that_ route — human hearts and emotions and all that shady stuff — so I decided to take it a different direction. I felt the smirk coming on before it hit my lips. "Really? Have a lot of experience with sheep?"

Dave, who had apparently overheard, fell off his stool. The blonde girl by Robby looked mortified. Robby hadn't joined Dave on the floor, but he was laughing pretty hard, too, and Dave's lab partner had apparently choked on his own saliva and was hacking it up over the dissection instruments.

"Fuck you, dude," Sam said, but the smile was back in the pucker of her mouth… along with a, _Seriously?_

I felt accomplished… _and_ I felt like a total dumbass for it, but what the fuck; I'm honest (kinda) and I will admit with my head held high that I felt accomplished for amusing Samantha Tucker. That definitely didn't stop me from intentionally taking her words to mean something else and popping out, "Let's not, if you don't mind. Sharing with sheep?" I shuddered. "Woolly smell's just too overpowering."

"Really?" she said, leaning forward and lacing her gloved and bloody fingers together. "It isn't the lack of stimulating conversation you can't handle?" Her eyes were ablaze with the green sparks of a challenge. "Why am I not surprised?"

Ouch. Points for Bitch Chick. I came back with a very witty, totally premeditated, "Fuck you."

And Sam, letting one corner of her mouth flick upwards for a dry second, just said, "Thought you didn't want to." ...leaving my brain to fall back on its ass, totally shell-shocked.

Wow. When had it gotten so hot in there?

…

"Man, she roasted you," Dave was saying, his mouth — which was way too fucking big for his own good — still ripped back in a broad grin.

It was passing period, and the two of us were shoving our way down a hallway full of short-ass underclassmen, who kept getting right in my way like they _wanted_ to be stepped on. "She totally didn't," I protested, scowling down at some scrawny kid, who wilted like a petunia under the look.

"Oh yeah, roasted!" Dave insisted as he clapped me on the shoulder and headed off down a side hall, "On a fucking spit!"

I shot him the finger, but only got a dirty look from a passing teacher for my efforts. Well, fuck you, too, Mr. Random Educator. Samantha Tucker, for anybody's information, had so not roasted me… she'd just gotten in a few more clever jibes than I had… but I would get my revenge, and soon.

Sooner than I thought, actually, because I'd just spotted the dark swoosh of my chestnut scrub brush ten paces ahead. And there, sticking out of the smart bitch's pocket, were the ragged edges of what looked like bunched-up leather. Now, what on earth could that be? I smirked and kicked my walking speed up a notch or two. 'Course I knew she'd just make another when she realized it was gone, but who was I kidding? Right now this wasn't really about stopping a witch; this was about taking down a bitch, and I was going for it.

Packed as the hallway was, only the creamy walls paused to glare at me as I caught up to my target, dipped my fingers into the very top of her pocket to retrieve my prize, and then fell back again… And she just kept listening to her bouncy friend blabbering on about whatever the fuck geek chicks talk about. The hex bag was all mine. Ha! Being the totally mature person that I am, I stuck my tongue out at the back of her head. Except then, of course, it hit me that I could be holding a pretty package of some seriously bad hoodoo, and I wasted no time ducking outside to torch the fucking thing.

Who was roasted now, bitch?

…

Of course, I couldn't gloat too much because I was still stuck on tailing duty. Dad hadn't lightened up even after I'd practically proven Sam was our girl because — surprise, surprise — he didn't trust me. To quote: "High school kid? I'm gonna wanna see it with my own eyes before we go stabbing her with anything," which I translated to, "I told you it would be good to work this case on your own, but we both know that was total crap and I just wanted you out of my hair. Now that it looks like your lead might actually be _the_ lead, I'm gonna have to go over this whole damn thing from the start to make sure you didn't fuck it up." Yeah, things were going great with dad.

But hey, at least he'd let me start bringing more than my butterfly knife to school. I'd felt fucking naked without a silver blade and my lighter, and I actually exhaled in relief — yes, like some goddamn chick reunited with her boyfriend — when I finally got to tuck them into my pockets before heading out the door. 'Cause Columbine High? Dangerous place, man. You never knew what was goin' down with all those punk-ass, skirt-wearing, rich kids; one of them might just up and decide to jump you one day, and then where would you be? (Probably stuck at home writing an apology note to the guy whose nose you just broke… but that's beside the point).

So, the point… The point was that I was trailing Sam out of school across the grassy quad like the stalker that I totally wasn't, using the broad-trunked trees in tactical ways to avoid enemy perception, and pushing aside all the little dumbasses who got in my line of sight.

"Scoot it, shrimp!" I snapped at one snail-like sophomore, who ignored me and decided to give me a dirty look and take his own sweet time… that is, until I wacked him smack between the shoulder blades and sent him plummeting face-first into the lawn. "Punk," I said, and danced away before he could get all indignant about it.

The whole thing seemed normal enough at first. Sam crosses quad. Check. Sam talks to Friend A. Check. Sam talks to Friends B and C. Check. Sam greets Acquaintances F, R and T on the way to student parking. Check. Sam gets in car. Check…

But she didn't drive home. And she didn't drive into town. She drove out towards the countryside, leaving me on the sidewalk with a huge "What the hell?" floating around in my head.

So, being a good son, I snapped the lock on some kid's bike and took off after her.

By the time we got to wherever the hell we were going, I was exhausted. I mean, crap; bike-riding is harder work than people give it credit for… probably because bike riders are men in tights, so it's hard to really think of them as hardcore. Respect and all, but spandex? Seriously?

Anyway, when I'd seen Sam's brake lights come on and stay on, I'd pulled off the road right away, 'cause no way in hell was I gonna let her realize I'd been following her. I stuffed the kid's bike — which I now hated more than my first fifth grade teacher — in between the trunks of two yellow-leafed trees, and then high-tailed it back along the roadside towards Sam's ugly-ass car. I ducked down behind it and peered just over the hood to get a good view of what was going down in the muddy clearing there. Sam had this big tin bucket full of all kinds of hoodoo shit: stalks of various plant stuff, a plastic Tupperware that looked like it had blood in it, and… were those chicken feet? Gross. Witches are so friggin skeevy. She plopped her bucket of disgusting crap down in the damp, dying grass and glanced about nervously. Then she knelt down next to it and dumped out each bag into the bucket, totally unceremoniously, just jammed it all in there. Next she tugged a crumpled sheet of binder paper out of her shirt, flattened it with her palms, and began to read. Gotta say I was liking the casual vibe, especially since I had a smug hunch that all her little chanting was gonna amount to a steaming pile of nothing. Sure enough, once she was done with the incantation, she reached for her pocket… and realized that the hex bag wasn't there. Nope. Burnt nice and crispy in a school trash can, bitch. I smirked. Whatcha gonna do now?

It turned out she was gonna panic. She jumped to her feet, eyes wide and on fire and… afraid? Well, okay, so I wasn't exactly smirking anymore, but the fuck did she have to be afraid of? So she couldn't knock off another poor, innocent bastard who'd made some insulting comment about her favorite pencil; she could get him tomorrow, right? I mean, what the hell was the big deal? Still, my intestines were knotting up a bit as she spun in circles, frantically combing the muddy, flattened grass around her and finding nothing. She looked up then, hazel eyes still blown so fucking wide, and they landed right on me… and I could tell she knew. There was just enough time for her China doll lips to part in the tiniest of horrified O's before she was flying off her feet and slamming down into the mud fifteen feet away.

"I thought I told you to back off!" a voice snarled through the air, just as some big-ass motherfucker stomped into the clearing from the woods. "You bitch."

My mouth popped into an O just like Sam's. The hell was happening here? Witch wars?

The big dude, who had that fat-but-tough look down to the T, marched over to her, bent down, and dug his porky fingers into her hair as he ripped back her head so that she had to look at him. "Samantha," he said, voice halfway between a croon and a growl, "I was sparing that cute tush of yours for bigger and better things… but you just had to go and ruin it." Then he drew back his fist and plugged her right in the face, forcing her back into the mud.

My brain was still stuck on a repeated loop of, "What the fucking fuck?" because here I suddenly was with one person who I was pretty damn sure was a witch getting beat up by a different dude who was also probably a witch… or maybe a demon? But I just didn't fucking know. I mean, not exactly what I'd been expecting for today. So, like, was I supposed to be saving someone? Or killing someone, maybe? And who?

"Dean!" a voice called, a mumbled and pretty hoarse voice, but it only took me a second to realize that it must be Sam's. "Light it," she croaked as the man's fist connected with her stomach.

From the way she was just lying there, taking every goddamn punch that he fired into her ribs, face, and really her whole fucking torso, I figured he must've had her pinned by some magical method because Sam didn't strike me as the type to give up and eat it for nothing.

Still, I didn't act. Just because I knew Sam a tiny bit better than the other guy didn't mean she was the one in the right here. Hell! For all I knew she could've murdered dozens of people in her life. No way was I helping her out with no proof… except then that fat motherfucker's hand knocked back her head, and she went completely limp, and some switch flipped in my brain. I mean, I couldn't let an unconscious girl get beat to death before my eyes, could I? Regardless of what she'd done. So suddenly I was up on my feet, sprinting towards her bucket as I fought with my jeans pocket to get the damn lighter out.

Evidently Sam had come back to because I heard a very garbled voice blubber out, "Burn it," and then, "Read back."

"Back of what?" I yelled. Accompanied by the dull thuds of fist on flesh, I flicked the lighter on and dropped it into the bucket.

"Bi…per…" she managed through the sticky pool of blood that was now dribbling down from her nose and filling her mouth.

I guessed that she meant the binder paper, and snatched it up out of the mud. Thank god there were only two sentences on the back, because, number one, I wasn't all that great at Latin, and two, I couldn't read her handwriting for shit. I mean, you'd think someone who was that big of a smartass would at least be able to make an A look vaguely like an A. But I guess little Miss Perfect just didn't bother wasting the time.

"Dean!"

Right. I stumbled out the spell, wincing at a particularly painful sounding crunch, and then turned to watch as the big man yelled. Digging his fingers into Sam's forearms, he glared up with bared teeth. Apparently the dumb fucker hadn't realized I was there until then, but too late now. As I watched, he was disintegrating into a mass of black dust, or ash or something. Who knows. More importantly, who the hell cares? Fucker was gone, and that's what mattered.

"Goodbye, witch boy," I heard a cracked voice mutter from the mud. Sam, of course. "That's why… you don't fuck… with hunters."

Oh, a hunter, huh? I snorted, dropped the binder paper back into the mud, and strode over to where she was wheezing on the ground. I held out my hand to help her up, but she beat it away. 'Course she did. Hunter or not, she was still an ungrateful little bitch.

Even given that, I wasn't expecting what she said as she panted to her feet, words coming out in scratchy gasps like a cat hacking up a hairball, "You—" Wheeze. "—are an idiot."

"What?" I stuffed my hand back against my side. "If you didn't notice, I just saved your sorry ass!"

She was on her feet now and I knew that if she wasn't still breathing so hard her mouth would've been the tiniest pucker I'd seen yet. "I wouldn't… have needed saving… if you hadn't jacked… my fucking hex bag," she managed at last. Who knew hazel could burn like that. "It was a protection charm. He couldn't detect… my presence while I had it."

"How the hell was I supposed to know that?" I protested as I hunched defensively into my jacket. "I thought you were a witch. Thought I was doin' the town a damn favor."

"Yeah," she muttered, having to some extent regained her ability to take in air. "Big favor."

I shook my head and looked away. In a voice that I thought was too low for her to hear, I muttered, "Bitch."

"Jerk," she shot back, hazel eyes still flaming dark like embers. "Talk about a near death experience."

"Fine, okay? My bad. But you coulda told me you were a hunter you know. Would've cleared up a lotta misunderstandings."

"And why would I have done that," she snapped, "when I didn't know _you_ were a hunter?"

I hated it when she had a point, and, with nothing to say, I just scowled through her, but, after standing there and breathing at each other for an awkwardly long time, I felt my anger draining, replaced by embarrassment, and, okay yeah, a little bit of guilt. "So…" I said, shooting her a sideways glance. "Why don't we just say we both could've played this hand better and celebrate that we're alive and the witch is dead."

Sam's eyebrows lowered. She opened her mouth as if about to argue and then snapped it shut again. She closed her eyes and I could see her forcing the lines out of her face. With another deep breath in and out, she opened her eyes again, fire now just smoking softly, and said, "Yeah. Let's do that." Then, with a sigh, she huffed, "But how in God's name am I going to explain this to my parents?"

It was true. Her entire body was covered in blossoming bruises, mud, and blood, her hair tangled up into a wild knot. She could've been a feral animal crawling straight out of its burrow in the woods after a really bad run in with a coyote. I couldn't entirely hide the grin spreading over my lips.

"Say you got jumped by this jerk named Dean," I shrugged with a glint in my eyes that she couldn't fail to miss. "Crazy-ass motherfucker. Totally unpredictable."

I could tell she didn't want to, but the corners of her mouth ran away from her, and then she was looking down at the squashed dirt with a lady-like snort of laughter, and I was looking at a pair of dimples that, for the very first time, had bloomed just for me.

Okay, fine… so maybe there was one thing that wasn't one-hundred-percent terrible about Samantha Tucker. That didn't mean I was going soft.


	5. Nebraska Nights and Gnomes

**Hey y'all! Thank you so much to my two reviewers, and to everyone else who reads this story. I suggest that if you didn't just read it, reread the tippy tail end of last chapter, 'cause this one picks up right there without much of a transition. Thanks again and hope all y'all enjoy the chapter!**

* * *

CHAPTER 5: NEBRASKA NIGHTS AND GNOMES

As Sam hobbled back towards her crap bucket of a car, I couldn't help but wince. She blended in a little too well with the metal, you know — dark blue and scratched-six-ways-from-Sunday — and the logical left half of my brain, which usually didn't get a lot of cred with me and my buddy the right brain, was whamming through my mental fences to tell me that even a serious badass like me couldn't have inflicted that type of damage without some seriously evil intent. Evil intent meant the folks would go psycho, and then they would call the cops, and that would really suck… and _that's_ why I said, "Though, you know, you could come back to my place to clean up before going home."

Sam flicked her head back my way with a horse-like snort, and met my eyes again, the hazel more than a tinge derisive. "You're kidding, right? Ever heard of stranger danger?"

"Oh, come on, Sammy, we just kicked some serious ass together; I mean, we're practically family!"

She rolled her eyes at my joke, which, yeah, was kinda lame I guess, but she didn't really look like she was that worried on the stranger danger front. Girl could probably kick some serious ass herself… though, considering the way she'd gone black and blue spotted like a deep sea octopus, maybe not today. Still, the way she was eyeing me seemed more like she was sizing me up than scared, and I bet she thought she could take me if it really came down to it.

That wasn't what she said, though. What she said was: "You want a ride?"

"What?"

She rotated her whole body to face me now, crossing her arms along the way. "You were the one stalking me on the bike, right?"

I just jerked my chin to the side in a shrug. Pride, you know. No need to deny it. "Yeah."

"So… do you really wanna pedal all the way back to town?" The tan expanse of her forehead was interrupted by climbing brows. "Do you even know the way?"

Yet again, bitch had a point. "You're offering to drive me home?" And, when she rolled her eyes for the zillionth time, I couldn't help from adding, "You keep doing that they're gonna get stuck up there."

After breezing open in one of her patented silent sighs, her mouth slunk back in on itself, and I could tell she wanted to lecture me about maturity and other crap along those lines, but all she said was, "Yes, I'm offering to drive you home."

Wow. Well… okay then. Come to think of it, my legs _were_ shot. Like I said, bike riding took some serious muscle work, hardcore shit that I totally hadn't been prepared for… plus, I mean, I'd been trying to keep up with a car. So yeah, I was feeling just a little bit trashed (like I'd been run over by a tractor trailer), and a ride sounded fucking fantastic. All that aside, it wasn't like I was gonna admit that guys in spandex had me beat, so, instead of "fucking fantastic," I gave a nonchalant, "Sounds good. I'll just—" hooking an awkward thumb over my shoulder, "—go get the bike then."

Sam rolled her eyes _yet again_, nodded, and went to collect the flame-tarnished tin bucket. When I came back, we kissed that muddy clearing a saucy, sweet goodbye, and I sent a mental note to that dead British guy to let him know that he was wrong; sometimes parting ain't such a sorrow.

It was quiet for a moment after that while Sam executed a three point turn on the narrow, mud-streaked, and pothole-laden road, but as soon as she had the crabby vehicle trundling in the right direction, she shattered that silence with a presumptuous, "So…hunter, huh?"

I knew we were gonna come to it eventually, but I hadn't thought it would be just yet, though, hey, not like I was complaining. Hunting was one of the few things I knew backwards and forwards, sideways, inside-out, and any other way you could put it, so for once Nerd Chick wasn't gonna be able to bust my brain out with some big vocab word that no one had used since 1859 or some shit. I saw that as a plus, and it was with a knowing flash of my eyebrows and my smallest, most sickeningly sugary smile that I said, "Yep. Since the get-go."

She turned for just a second, an acknowledgement of my statement, but I could see that her eyes were still tainted with faint foam trails of skepticism. "You were born into a hunting family?"

My high tanked just like that. I mean, I guess I'd walked into it — maybe even asked for it — but still: so not where I'd wanted to go with this friendly little chat. "No," I said, feeling the smile sucked off my face like liposuction. "My mom was, uh, killed by some supernatural freak when I was four, and my dad dug into the whole thing after that… took me right along with him." Which was as deep into it as I was willing to go. No skin-shredding heart-to-hearts today. Instead, I coughed in a way that was way too socially awkward for my class of cool and said, "What about you?"

Sam's eyes had been focused on the road, but now they tripped wide open and flicked towards me in surprise.

I tried to drop the sticky residue of my own discomfort and focus instead on hers. _Ha!_ my brain was smirking smugly, _Karma's a bitch, honey._

Sam said, "Me? Um… similar I guess. An accident, you know… with family."

"Dead uncle?" Hey, no one ever said I was sensitive.

But she shook her head, hair winding against itself like dark twine, or soft bark maybe… something earthy and rich, but fluffy too… maybe like— I mean, not that I cared what her hair was like or anything; it was just there; I noticed; that's not a crime; doesn't mean squat.

Still, when she began to speak again, my brain latched gratefully onto the words. No hair. No mother-induced awkwardness. No weird poetic musings.

"Not like that," she said. "No one died."

And then, in a halting summary, and with me analyzing each word in more depth than I'd ever analyzed any book in school so that I wouldn't end up staring at her mouth — nose, ear, whatever — like some eighth-grade loser, she told me her story.

* * *

The year was 1990, and, at nine years old, Jonah Harvelle was a little bit embarrassed to admit that he loved his stepmom. He loved her sundried face and her sun-squinted eyes and her sun-tanned and sun-spotted skin. He loved her low, growly voice and the dry smile that always creased her lips when he or his brother did something really dumb. He loved how she smelled — dust and wood, alcohol and laundry detergent — and he loved how she leaned solidly over counters to refill drinks or smack people upside the head when they said really stupid shit. There were a lot of things to love about Ellen Harvelle, but mostly, Jonah loved that she brought Sam — something he would eat ten pounds of worms and swallow his own tongue before admitting. Nine-year-old boys were not supposed to enjoy spending time with seven-year-old girls, and Jonah knew it, but that didn't change the mysterious workings of the cogs in his brain, or his heart, or whatever it was; it just meant that he didn't get all out-and-open or mushy-gushy about his affections.

Today for instance, April twelfth, he'd been thrilled since the moment Ellen had woken him with her knuckles rapping against the thick wood of his bedroom door and saying, "Get your lazy asses out of bed; you still got school, you knuckleheads," because today Sam was coming. Matthew had hugged the pillow more tightly over his head and pretended that he could escape the call of teachers and textbooks, but Jonah was up and ready. It was gonna be a really good day.

However, when the sun had started in on her plank walk towards the western horizon and he was prepping to leave the school basketball court, that's not what he told his friends. Shooting Tim and Harry reluctant smiles, he said, "My mom told me I gotta be home by 4:30 'cause her brother's coming over," making sure they knew how much he didn't want to go, even as his feet itched to hit the pavement. Some of his friends gave him sympathetic pats on the back, while others smacked him (with no real hard feelings, of course) for ducking out of their game early. A few were too focused on the ball or the hoop to notice, but Jonah didn't mind. Today Sam was coming.

Hefting up his backpack — plain red 'cause only solid colors were cool now — he waved goodbye and scooped his bike off the curb. As he pedaled home along the lazy, afternoon Nebraska streets, he tried to whistle; Matthew had taught him how back in February, but he still wasn't any good. Today it didn't matter, though. Tuneless and shrill and breathy, he whistled as loud as his lungs could manage, and, if anyone had complained, he would've ignored them because the need to whistle out his happiness bubbled deep in Jonah's stomach, and no one could stop him. When he got back, Sam would be there.

Sure enough, as he sped into the Roadhouse's gravel lot, wheels kicking up the sharply protesting rocks, there was a tan minivan among the small crowd of other vehicles. With its clean and sparkling metal frame, it stood in sharp contrast to the mud-crusted hides of the surrounding trucks, a queen bee among the workers. Jonah beamed at it, tucked his bike around the side, and then burst in through the back door. Everybody hunkered down in the dusty hub was a regular, long since numbed to Jonah's antics, and not a one flinched as the screen crashed back against the frame. For the most part, they kept on sipping their coffee or beer, grumbling down at cracked, wooden tabletops. Mallory glanced up from her post behind the thickly scarred counter and took a break from the now almost subconscious scrubbing-motion of her hand to wave hello, but only the backs of Jonah's sneakers took note as the rest of him disappeared through another door, the one that led upstairs to the house part of the Roadhouse.

Aunt Terry and Uncle Ben had already been fastened to stools around the island in the all-purpose living room so that they could talk to Ellen and just generally keep her company while she unloaded the dishwasher. But Jonah wasn't all that interested in the adults. His eyes scraped around the room, low slatted ceiling to boot-flayed floor, until they landed next to Ellen, at about waist-level, on a bobbing brown ponytail. Jonah rearranged his lips to tuck away the smile. The ponytail was attached to a four foot ten stick of sass named Samantha Tucker, though she'd punch you if you called her that. She hadn't noticed Jonah yet, leaning back to support the full weight of the giant iron pot she was lugging towards the stove.

Only once she'd put it down with an exhale of effort did she turn and spot him in the doorway. Jonah's heart jumped at the spark he saw light up in her eyes, but, always the princess, she smothered it quickly, along with the upward jump of her lips, and nodded, "Jonah," in a curt and prim voice.

"Samantha," he said, equally cordial, "How pleasant to make your re-acquaintance."

He saw her lips pursing inwards as she fought the smile, but then his view was blocked by his aunt and uncle as they stood up to come hug him.

"Hey there," Uncle Ben grinned, tugging him into the thick, deodorant-scented folds of his stomach, "You must've grown three inches since we last saw you."

Jonah ducked away into Aunt Terry's arms, unsure what they expected him to say to something like that; small talk had never been his forte. "I'm five four," he mumbled as he unstuck his face from Aunt Terry's hideous wool sweater, hoping this would suffice.

It didn't really, and they might very well have gone on with their innocuous prodding for another good couple minutes if they hadn't been interrupted by the fifth fundamental force of the universe, which came in the form of a short woman in cowboy boots. Ellen, as it turned out, had as little patience for "useless talk" as her stepson.

"Hey, Jo," she said, voice echoing forcefully out of the cupboard where she was stacking plates and effectively cutting off her brother's thoughts, "Why don't you take Sam down to the tire dump. Seems like something she might like." Turning her squinted eyes, which were now curved in one of her dry smiles, down upon her niece, she said, "Sound good to you, sweetie?"

Sam nodded — very few people had the balls to deny Ellen's "suggestions" — and Jo wasted no time ducking away from the bemused expressions of his aunt and uncle. As soon as the door was closed behind them, however, and the two cousins were trooping down the loudly protesting staircase, Sam wrinkled her nose and asked, "What's fun about old tires?"

There were a great many things that were fun about old tires, and Jonah was about to launch into an in-depth and highly technical explanation when a deep voice cut him off.

"Hey, Jo," it called, reverberating up the stairway and causing the steps to raise their twitchy hackles. Jo jumped along with them, but, when he snapped his head towards the noise, he was greeted by a familiar lopsided smile, and he let his bony shoulders drip back to their resting position. Just Mark, lounging with Connor and Dwight at one of the corner booths. The scruffy man jerked his head in a lazy beckon. "Come on over for a sec."

Jonah knew the three well. They weren't just regulars; they were hunters, and they often worked cases with Jonah's dad, Bill. Mark and Connor blended easily into the long line of hunters that frequented the Roadhouse — Mark with stubble that could sand your skin clean off, Connor with a ratty and graying beard — but Dwight was an odd ball in the crowd; he looked more like a business man for whom every day was casual Friday than a redneck with no money, no wife, and a raging vendetta. Still, they were all gruff geezers underneath.

Jonah smiled as he led Sam over to the table. He didn't usually talk much around his dad's buddies, but that didn't mean he didn't like them.

Mark cracked a broader grin through his rusty stubble when he noticed Sam.

"Hola, honey," he nodded to her.

"Hello," Sam replied, though her answering smile was on the shy side of friendly.

The other two hunters grumbled general greeting and then turned their attention back to Jonah.

"So, Jo," Mark picked up, rubbing his rough palms together with a soft, scratching noise, "I've been waiting here for a chance to talk to Bill for upwards of an hour now. Is he staked out in some lonely corner upstairs?"

Jonah shook his head. "He went fishing with Matthew," he explained, an apology written into his dark eyes, "They won't be back until around 7:00."

"Damn. Really hoping to hook him for this one."

"Sorry," Jonah mumbled with a tentative twitch of his lips.

"Nah, that's okay. It's not your fault, now is it? Anyway," Mark grinned, "I was looking for you, too. Laura made some amazing cookies and she told me she'd have my hide if I didn't get you to take one." He pulled a tin up from the seat beside him, flicked off the top, and held it out. There was a single, crumbling cookie lying off to the side on the bottom. Hesitantly, Jonah reached out and scooped it up.

"Thank you," he said, continuing to hold the cookie without eating it.

"Thank Laura," Mark snorted. "And thank these jokers for eating all the rest." He kicked Connor under the table. Connor grunted and looked down at the table.

Dwight said, "Sorry we don't have one for your cousin, too."

…

As soon as the kids were gone, Dwight raised his head to meet Mark's eyes. His mouth was a straight line.

"I don't like it," he said.

Mark tried to keep his voice calm as he sighed, "Neither do I," but his patience was wearing thin. They'd already had this little talk… twice. "But," Mark continued, "like we agreed—" He hoisted his brows, daring Dwight to deny his complicity. "—this way is gonna save lives in the long run. We tail the kid, make sure he eats the damn thing, the Cuco smells the rosemary, comes looking for some nicely seasoned child meat, and we stab its fuckin' heart out 'fore anyone's in real danger."

Dwight's mouth had only turned further down.

"Otherwise," Mark pressed, spreading his hands expressively across the scarred tabletop, "it goes back into its damn hidey hole and doesn't show its ugly mug again in our lifetime. So… best of two evils, right?"

He stared at Dwight, who in turn stared at the bottle wrapped between his hands, until the other man twitched his mouth in what Mark took to be reluctant acceptance.

He let himself relax back against the wall of the booth, but he kept his voice clipped and pointed as he spoke, just in case Dwight got any funny ideas. "Good. Then we head out in five."

…

Unfortunately, Jonah was more generous than the hunters had given him credit for. He didn't eat the cookie. He gave it to Sam.

Holding it up like it was a particularly cardboard-flavored piece of communion, Sam said, "My mom always tells me not to accept food from strangers."

Jonah wacked her with his hip to send her stumbling several paces into the newly sprouted grass on the shoulder of the road. "Who you callin' stranger, little cousin?" he demanded with a grin.

Sam scowled (though she didn't mean it) as she tromped back onto the sun-bathed asphalt. "I was talking about those men," she clarified, but took her first rabbit-like bite anyway.

"They're friends of my dad's," Jonah assured her, a butterfly of joy springing up in his chest as he surreptitiously watched her ravish the cookie.

"Okay," Sam agreed, though really, the crumbs dotting her bottom lip had already spoken for her. Jonah snorted as she stuck her tongue out to lick up all remaining traces of cookie — a less than successful attempt — and she shot her thin hip out with enough force to knock him into the road. "So," she smirked as he huffed back to her side, rubbing his leg where she'd knocked it, "how long 'til we get to the tire place?"

…

As it turned out, the tire dump was just as sock-rockin' as Jonah had promised. Bordered by some of the state's few surviving trees (veterans of the agricultural boom), the warm stacks of rubber were like a castle from another world, hidden away from the highway, the endless oceans of Nebraska's crop fields, and all other signs of modernism. Rather than walk all the way around to the gate, Jonah explained to Sam how to climb over the rusty chain-link fence, but she just rolled her eyes at him and scampered up — "I know how to climb, Jo." — with a contemptuous smile.

Jonah smiled, too, and followed. Then, instead of fences, they climbed the tire spires, walls, and mountainsides — the entire terrain of mud-grained rubber — arches, valleys, and a few foreign weeds sprouting through the packed dirt. It was spring, after all, and life just couldn't be suppressed. Jonah and Sam were mountain goats, scrambling up and down with quick leaps and small, claw-like hands as if they were invincible, immortal.

"Do you wanna play hide and seek," Sam beamed, face peachy bright from exertion, walls of sass collapsing with the fading sunshine.

Jonah was very aware that it was a game for little kids, not big, grown-up fourth graders, but right now he didn't care. He wanted to, and there was no one to see. "'Course I do, little cousin."

And without further invitation, Sam ran away, disappearing behind a deflated truck tire, which by some miracle had its rim still intact. Jonah grinned after her, pushing the sticky strands of dirty blond back from his forehead, but the tire watched warily through its single, empty eye, and its cynicism turned out to be well deserved…

… because Jonah couldn't find Sam.

…

"We should've waited for Bill and got his permission to use Matthew," Dwight grumbled as he and Connor squatted together behind a particularly large ring of rubber, age-hardened eyes scanning the dump yard. "Jonah's too young."

Connor, never a man of many words, grunted, and said, "Jus' a year apart," which they both knew wasn't the point.

Matthew had been taught to shoot a gun and use a knife — of course, in the interest of full disclosure, he couldn't do much more than hit a can or carve a pumpkin — but it was better than nothing, and Jonah had nothing.

Neither man wanted to dwell on this, so Dwight griped on, "Where's Mark anyhow?"

Connor shrugged. Mark was tailing the kid around the lot rather than just keeping general lookout like they were, so he could be anywhere. "He'll call when he needs us," he assured his tangled beard. "No way to know 'til then." Having exhausted his linguistic ability with this proclamation, he examined the graying curls of his facial hair for a moment longer before glancing up. When he did, though, his gaze instantly fell on the dull brown of Dwight's shirt sleeves, and, with a lump of surprise rising in his gut, he realized that, underneath the fabric, his friend's arm muscles were tense and twitching. Connor hoisted his gaze up to the other man's face, noting the tight lines of his eyes as they skipped across tire mound after tire mound. The sun hadn't yet been entirely swallowed by the land, but here, circled by the ancient tribe of trees and more recent alleyways of tires, the shadows had almost completed their conquest of the lot, and that meant the monster, the Cuco, would show up soon. Connor creaked his back into a less bent position. "Maybe we should go lookin' for him," he suggested, more to ease Dwight's nerves than his own.

Dwight, eyes still alert and roaming, nodded slowly and began to stand.

As the oldest of the three, Connor had earned the privilege of sluggishness, and he was planning on holding out for a few more minutes before following Dwight's example when a yell sliced through the cooling air: high, sharp, and short.

Both hunters jerked to full attention, on their feet and running in less time than it took to drop a dime.

"Mark!" Dwight shouted between hot intakes of air and the pounding of his sneakers, "Where on God's green earth are you?"

"Here!" a ragged voice called back, Mark's voice, but it was distorted by all the rubber it had bounced off of, and neither Dwight nor Connor could make heads or tails of where it came from. They kept running anyway, tire aisle after tire aisle, weeds watching indifferently, and, after another few wrong turns, they made out a new voice. It was hard to hear over the thuds of shoes on packed dirt and the blood in their ears, but it was still distinctly yelling.

"Sam!?" it said, cracked and panicked. "Sam!?"

And goddamn it if that wasn't Jonah's voice, also looped around and tied in knots by the black rubber walls, but definitely Jonah's, which meant he wasn't the one in trouble.

Connor's eyes widened to feel the full slap of the wind as he snapped his spine towards Dwight. "It's the cousin," he panted, brain fuzzing around the edges. He hadn't taken the time to really examine the kids when Mark'd called them over to the table, but he knew the cousin was a girl, younger even than Bill's boy, and no way in tarnation did she know how to handle a monster. Shit, she might not even know how to multiply two-digit numbers! Connor's old and much-abused stomach collapsed.

In contrast, Dwight's face remained tensed and focused. The only sign that he'd even heard the yells was that he was suddenly pushing his skinny knees to their limits as he tore down the shadow-bruised canyons, leaving Connor several paces behind. The older man struggled desperately to prevent the gap from widening, focusing only on the heels of Dwight's tennis shoes, until another sound brought him up short. Snarling. Close by.

Ignoring the protests of his twice-broken ankle, he heaved himself up onto the low wall of tires to his left, and hauled his gun to his shoulder. The Cuco was there, not thirty feet away, the pale skin on its back appearing plum-tinged and icy in the shadow-light. Its growls and snarls were muted because it had burrowed its whole torso into a tire stack, rag-clothed backside twisting from side to side as it tried to force itself deeper. The only explanation was that the girl had hidden in there, and Connor fired before he could blink.

The monster's legs twitched and it dragged itself out of the pile with a hiss, spinning towards Connor and his offending (and useless) piece of artillery, which Connor dropped in favor of his knife. Iron to the heart was the way to handle this cabron. Gripping the age-roughened hilt and grimacing down at the humanoid creature now stalking towards him, he noted the bloody scratches on its face with more than a spark of surprise. Had the girl done that? She might be more of a live wire than he'd given her credit for, but now wasn't the time to wonder; el Cuco had just bared its fifty saliva-slickened fangs, and Connor's stomach, though acidic with determination, was feeling less and less solid about the six inches of iron in his fist.

Lucky for him, Mark had caught up. He burst between two rows of tires on the far side of the monster, facing its bony back, and his eyes blazed with the same rusty fire as his stubble. Closing the distance in five loping strides, he spat, "Never shoulda left Mexico, pendejo," and rammed his knife between two ribs. El Cuco snarled a spittle-thick war cry and spun on him, but its body jerked as it lunged, and then shivered to the ground. Its slit pupils rolled and reddened with rage, but it couldn't do more than curl back its cracked lips in a defiant smile, and, after a moment, it couldn't even do that.

Mark wiped his knife on the towel that he always kept tucked into the waste of his jeans, and then he glanced up at Connor.

Connor nodded at him. "Goo' work," he grunted, but he couldn't keep the tension out of his tongue as it formed the words. His gaze kept stuttering back towards the pile of tires because the girl was still in there, and… Well, there was no way to know how much of her was in there.

Stiffening his shoulders, he dropped down from the wall of mud-flecked rubber he'd been standing on and approached the girl's hideout. No use to delay it. If this was the type of fuck-up that was going to have him more drunk than living for the next couple years, it was best to know as soon as possible so he could start ordering the whiskey.

But, when he was just three feet from the hole the Cuco'd been rooting around in, a head popped out. It was a circular-eyed, fly-haired, and trembling head, but it was a head all the same, and a knot that Connor had been calling indigestion untied in his gut. He took the last two steps and held out a hand, and a small set of five rusty-colored fingers latched onto it. He helped her out.

It was clear once she was straightened beside him, that she was not entirely alright. On the right side of her body, there were two long and glistening red lines, burning from collarbone to elbow, and Connor knew that as soon as she got over the shock numbness, they'd be stinging like a bitch. Right now though, that wasn't what had her eyes blown huge and round like mushroom tops.

"Not a person," she said, and there was no question in her voice. There are a few things seven-year-olds understand more easily than their adult counterparts.

Mark had the nerve to laugh at that. He had moved towards them and now let a rough hand fall lightly to the top of the girl's head. "You're right," he said, "Bastard was a monster from Mexico—" He used the Spanish pronunciation. "—and you clawed his fuckin' face off. Good for you, honey."

To Connor's great surprise, a feeble smile fluttered across the kid's lips before she returned to her previous expression of half-fledged trauma. Girl _was_ a live wire.

"Sam? Sam?" The voice preceded the boy around yet another tire-made corner, and he came into view a second later at a tripping sprint. Dwight was right on his heels. Both reined in their whipping legs a bit when they caught sight of the pale and bloody body twisted in the dirt, but, after realizing that it wasn't Sam's, Jonah leapt forward again. Dwight jogged more slowly behind.

"You're alive," Jonah smiled weakly, stopping in front of his cousin.

"Hello," Sam said, which wasn't the appropriate response, but, given that she was seven, and given that she'd almost been eaten a few minutes before, nobody held it against her.

With the immediate danger averted, Jonah once more became very aware that he was a nine-year-old boy and there were three adult men watching, so he gave Sam's upper arm (the uninjured one) an awkward pat and then dropped his eyes to examine the nearest weed.

Connor realized that certain measures had to be taken, coughed, and said, "So… We should get you kids home."

Several drops of Sam's blood fell to brighten the dusk-dimmed earth, and she nodded.

…

"A car frame?" Ellen said. She wasn't buying it.

"My god, she needs a Tetanus shot!" That was Uncle Ben, of course. He didn't quite know what to do with himself, touching Sam's face fleetingly and then glancing up at his sister with a damp dollop of panic in his eyes. "Is there a clinic around?"

Ellen didn't look at him. She was busy staring at Jonah, hard, and he found his head bending towards the floor as if her squint had a physical force behind it. The dirty blonde hair, sweat-slicked and limp, slid to hide his face.

"Yeah," Ellen said, still not looking away from her stepson, "There's one in town. Ten minutes up the road."

Uncle Ben pulled away from Sam and began patting his pockets down, searching for car keys. "Good. Good," he said. "Thanks, Ellen. But I don't know… should I wait for Terry to get back? Or should I—"

Ellen cut him off. "Why don't you go ask Mallory for the first aid kit. I doubt Terry would like it if you left without her."

Ben nodded. He usually hated it when his little sister bossed him around, but right now she knew best. He stumbled to the door and out, hurried steps echoing back up the wooden walls of the staircase.

Ellen, now the only adult in the room, dug her hands into her hips and faced the two kids in full. "Tell me what happened," she commanded. "What was it?"

Jonah couldn't look up from the fraying edge of the carpet. They'd promised Mark they wouldn't say, but, when facing his stepmother's death glare, that resolve seemed like a wall made of Jell-O.

Sam wasn't telling anybody anything. She'd mostly gotten over the shock, and without its semi-soothing effect, the pain from the gashes was making her white-faced and mute, so all she did was stare back at Ellen and drip blood onto the carpet.

Ellen frowned at her for a moment, but then, determining that she wasn't anywhere close to death's door, latched her stare back onto the older kid. She let her voice dip into a warning as she said, "Jo," and that's all it took. He spilled the story into the light-warmed room.

When he was done, Ellen didn't look fully satisfied. Her lips and eyes had tightened into dark lines, and, like a hound on the scent, she obviously wanted to press them for more. To Jonah's relief, however, Uncle Ben chose that moment to bump back through the door, red baggy in hand.

Ellen snatched it from him and squatted down next to Sam. Her eyes were still hard slits, but all she said as she pulled out the bandaging was, "Welcome to the family, hon."

…

What Sam told Dean was a much abridged version of this.

* * *

"Wow," I said, "So, stranger danger, huh? You know, I think I've got some left-over potato chips in my bag. Are you sure you don't—"

"Shut up."

"No? They might even have rosemary seasoning."

"Making light of my near death experiences never gets old to you, does it?"

"Well, after two failed attempts," I drawled, "you gotta admit you've kinda lost credibility. Next time you get close to dying you gotta stick it out to the bitter end; otherwise how is anyone supposed to take it as a serious threat?"

"Next time I won't _have_ a near death experience," she explained to the windshield, "because I'll make sure I'm alone so there are no idiots like you around to go fucking it up."

"Ouch." I drew my face into an exaggerated wince. "Someone didn't get their beauty sleep... Bitch."

Her lips scrunched into a scowl aimed my way, but it was a friendly scowl if such a thing exists.

"And I stand by my assessment that _you_ are a big, fat jerk."

"Hmm… Not so down with the fat part, but I'm cool being a jerk… and big." I smirked. Definitely cool being big.

She snorted. "You know that's only something a jerk would say."

"Only something a bitch would say," I shot back with a dorky grin, and her scowl lost any edge it'd ever had.

Talking to Sam was weird — not weird like: "Aunt Lonny, I have to say I've never seen _quite_ so many uses for halibut" — but weird, you know? Maybe 'cause I didn't usually _talk_ to girls. I mean, I did, but there were a lotta better things to do with a willing señorita than read her your bucket list, and I wasn't gonna be the guy to waste those opportunities. But Sam was about as far from a "willing señorita" as Timbuktu was from Tivoli, and I'd never thought that talking to someone like that — geek, bitch, and hunter extraordinaire — could be so… well… so fucking normal. It was — and I'd sell my soul to the goddamn tooth fairy before saying this out loud — but it was fun.

…

When the car had squeaked to a stop in front of my place, the first words out Sam's mouth were, "That's your house?"

I cocked my chin at her. "Yeah, why?"

"I don't know. I just… didn't think it'd be so… gingerbread."

"Gingerbread?" It sounded bad. "The hell does that mean?"

"You know, like: cozy family, grandma baking cookies twenty-four-seven." Her smile was fructose and arsenic. "Gingerbread."

I scowled. "Sure we're… tight, I guess—" Hell would freeze over before I'd use the word _cozy_, "—but there's no old lady nailed to the stove by her damn petticoats, and it's sure as hell not… gingerbread."

"Dude, you have a garden gnome."

There was nothing to say to that, so I got out of the car.

As I hiked up the brick walk, I could tell Sam was still watching — because she hadn't driven away yet and what the fuck else would she be doing? Not that I blamed her for staring at my ass; I mean, it was a pretty decent ass if I do say so myself — but that didn't stop me from pausing on the doorstep to size up that little fucker the gnome before going inside. Tubby fellow in a green coat; I could take him out if he caused me any grief. With a nod to let him know I meant business, and then a nod back towards the car (now pulling away) in the only form of thanks my not-so-witchy bitch was gonna get, I turned to push through the door.

Dad had evidently just walked in from the kitchen because there was a sandwich in his hand, and he was shooting me this kinda crooked, knowing smile that made my toes itch.

"Two and a half weeks," he said, "and you've already got a girl hanging off your arm?"

If my good mood was a bubble bath — which I enjoy thinking it is — then dear dad had just pulled the drain plug. Woosh! And out the giggle water went. "Nah," I breezed, keeping it cool, "we're just working on a school project together, and since _someone_ won't let me borrow the car, she offered to drop me off… Some people are nice like that." Had I really just called Sam nice? Geez. Time to change directions. "She's a geek dad, totally not my type."

Dad shrugged his eyebrows and took a bite of his sandwich, so I couldn't tell if he was still smirking or not. I shook my head, dropped my stuff, and headed towards the stairs. With each step, the mud puddle forming in my stomach got darker and stickier, and what was bothering me was that I couldn't be sure if that was because what I'd told dad wasn't true, or because what he'd said to me wasn't either.


	6. When Words Don't Work

**Hey y'all, I'm interrupting to apologize for something about last chapter. I might go back and try to update it sometime to fix this, but until then (if it ever happens) I'm just gonna tack it into this note. I planned out Sam's extended family tree for this AU, but in editing, cut it out of the actual text, so, hopefully to make everything just a teensy bit clearer, I'll explain it here quickly. If you worked it all out, feel free to skip this:**

**Samantha Tucker is the daughter of Benjamin and Terry Tucker.**

**Ellen is Benjamin's younger sister.**

**Bill Harvelle is Ellen's husband.**

**Jonah (Jo) and Matthew Harvelle are Bill's children from a previous marriage, which makes Ellen their stepmother. Therefore, Jonah and Matthew are Sam's cousins through marriage, but aren't technically related.**

**MOST IMPORTANT: Sam's parents know absolutely squat about the supernatural. Don't believe in it. Never heard of hunting. Ellen learned about it through Bill, who is a hunter, and both Bill's kids are in the know, too. Sam did not know monsters existed until her run in with the Cuco, and her parents still have no clue.**

**If anything else from last chapter makes zero sense, please drop me a dime in a review (which I think I've finally worked out how to respond to :) ) and I will try to make it clearer. My brain is like my room (full of totally disorganized crap), so what hits the keyboard often only makes sense to my own mental cogs; don't be afraid to call me out on this.**

**Also, I'm a horrible person for taking this long to post. If anyone's reading "All Alone Again," I'm an even more horrible person, but I'm not abandoning that story either... it might just be awhile. My life is crazy right now, but it will get better mid-June. I actually ended up cutting this chapter short 'cause it was taking me centuries to finish everything I wanted to put in, but hopefully that means it won't be a month before I get the next chap up.**

**Sorry for that horrendously long note… and on to the story.**

* * *

CHAPTER 6: WHEN WORDS DON'T WORK

Two days later, I made some half-assed excuse to dad, hiked into town, tip-toed across a wilting flower garden, and pushed through the hidden door to stage my dramatic return to Columbine's nerds-only library. Alright, it wasn't really all that dramatic. The only person on the basement floor was Mrs. Doily (by which I mean the librarian; yeah, sue me, I forgot her name), but she made me feel like I was the real deal. Second my shoe touched down on library property, her happy grandma beam flicked on like a neon welcome sign, and she didn't stop until I disappeared up the stairwell… which was actually kinda creepy. She took it upon herself to make it very, very clear that if I needed any help, any at all, I shouldn't hesitate to ask. I assured her that I was fine on my own, but Doily-Lady just kept flashing those pearly whites, convinced she had a convert… a new book nun.

Given that we can agree I'm about as far from a book nun (or any other type of friggin nun) as they come, the question remains: why was I at the library? Hell, why were dad and I still hanging around Middle-of-Nowhere, Wisconsin? 'Cause, you know, I'd been dying to get out just a week ago.

But, things had changed a bit, and now—

"Dean?"

The first letters hit on surprise; the rest quickly dipped into amusement. I spun to spy a deep red turtleneck hovering around the edge of a bookshelf, topped by a head of overgrown brown fluff, and everything that the shirt didn't cover was a funky yellow-brown shade, like somebody'd taken it into their head to inflict some serious abuse on a banana. Fruit bruises.

"What are you doing here?" Sam continued.

Her tone said she already knew, and it was tugging a tiny curl into her lips, but fuck all if I was just gonna hand it to her.

"It's a library," I said. "What do you think I'm doing here?"

She cocked an eyebrow. "Disturbing the peace?" Her lips twitched again, and when she went on, it was with a tone dripping in sarcasm. "Are you seriously telling me you're looking for a book?"

"I knew you were in honors for a reason."

She shrugged. "Yeah, but I didn't know you were literate."

The only reasonable response to that was to make a face, which I did, and then came out with the ass-whooping retort, "Well… I am."

The smile that'd been circling the edges of her mouth since we'd started our little chat now made the final leap to claim her face (obviously because she was blown away by my wit). Or, she started to smile anyways; it morphed into a wince pretty damn quick as it stretched her busted lower lip a bit too tight.

I smirked. "_Some_one needs a makeover."

The wince flipped to a scowl, but I (sensitive soul that I am) ignored it and pushed on, "How did it go with your folks, by the way? Are they raining down fire and brimstone? Seeking divine retribution, maybe?"

"Uh, no," she said, and an inexplicable ounce of pinkness floated to the top of her cheeks like blood-tinged sea foam. "I told them I was reading while crossing the street and, uh... got hit by a car."

"And they bought that?" I snorted.

The pinkness deepened, and she mumbled, "It wouldn't be the first time."

Sure, I'm an ass, but really, how was I supposed to _not _smirk at that? I mean, she'd just admitted that at one point in life she'd been book-worming so hard she got hit by a fucking car. Gotta say, nerd humor is seriously underrated.

Noticing my delight, she shot me an irritated eye-roll (cheeks still burning under their bruises, might I add) and said, "So, does the conclusion of our business mean you're leaving town now?"

Ouch. Bitch knew how to throw a metaphorical punch, and it landed smack dab center in my metaphorical sore spot, which, for the record, was pretty damn sore right then, but I hid the scowl and, you know, whatever else, and shot her a cocky grin. "You kiddin'?" I said, "I have Gina Andrews this close." I squinted at her through a tiny gap between my thumb and forefinger. "I can smell it in the air, and that's not the type of ass you leave behind."

Her eyebrows quirked across the banana-shaded skin. "She the blonde?" she said as she crinkled her nose.

I nodded, and Sam carried on, "Not surprised. She always did have pretty crappy taste." Another illegible smile twitched across her tightened lips, and, as she spun away back between the shelves, I wondered if maybe I _was_ illiterate. Definitely dumb, 'cause fuck, had I really just said that? I mean, the only reason I'd come here in the first place was to—

I mean… it just wasn't my most brilliant moment. Not like she hadn't said rude shit, too, after all. Hell, she'd basically implied that she wanted me to haul ass out of her pretty little town, and then she'd told me point blank that I was a bad catch. So screw her. If she wanted to walk away and leave me standing in a library where there was absolutely squat I wanted to read except maybe a manual on how to handle frickin women, that was her own goddamn choice. Free will! This was America! Just… oh fuck it, who was I kidding?

I spun with a scowl as deep as Lake Michigan to find librarian lady peeping up the stairs, and had to forcibly restrain myself from shouting, "The hell _you_ lookin' at?"

"Need any help?" she chirped hopefully.

God, she had no idea.

"No," I said, unable to entirely erase the dark scrunch of my eyebrows, and, even knowing how immature it would look, I didn't waste another second before I trudged past her back down the stairs and out the door.

…

"I don't get it," Dad grumbled as he stomped into the house, angrily slapping off the leaves that had blown into his hair from the increasingly windy world outside. (Seriously, it was getting to be drown-yourself-in-a-hot-pocket cold, and it was only the third week of October.) But that was Wisconsin.

I grunted from my domain on the big red couch. Having occupied all available territory — one leg thrown over the back, the other stretched all the way down to the far-side armrest, and my head lolled onto the sinfully soft cushions — I gotta say I wasn't keen on moving to give his statement the proper level of acknowledgement; couldn't quite work up the willpower to sound interested when I finally mumbled, "Don't get what?"

Dad scowled at me. "The case, of course. God, boy, what's gotten into you? Witch or some other son-of-a-bitch causes mayhem for the past three months and then goes all radio silence? That isn't setting off alarm bells like a damn foghorn in your brain? 'Cause, son, if that's the case, then I think you're going a bit soft around the edges."

Right. See, I hadn't exactly told dad that the problem was solved. Once I did, he'd have our bags packed before I could say, "Christo," and we'd be outta town for good. And, you know, I just wasn't… ready.

So all I said was, "Huh," took dad's exasperated look in stride, and drifted back into my tepid bath of guilt and self-pity.

…

"Dude. Again? Really?"

"Huh?" I said, not really having processed the words or who was speaking. Fucking Samantha Tucker was walking down the hallway twenty feet ahead of us, and the back and forth rock of her hips as she moved her legs was like one of those dangly things they use for hypnosis. Left. Right. Left. Right. Left… and I wondered vaguely if maybe she really was a witch after all. Mostly, though, I wondered how it would feel to have those hips glued between my hands so that I could set them straight and stop that goddamn rocking.

"You're staring at Sam's ass," the amused voice, which I now recognized as Robby's, said.

Not bothering to put any oomf behind the words, I muttered, "Am not," and continued to commit my crime.

Dave snorted. "Of course you're not. Remember, Robby? He's not brushing Gina off either; he's just '_biding his time._'"

I'd told them that — the 'biding my time' crap — when they began asking why I hadn't followed through on what I'd started with a perfectly willing Gina Andrews. They'd been suspicious about my explanation then, and they sure as hell didn't buy it now. Now they found the whole situation comical.

"I know," Robby added helpfully, "…I just didn't know he was biding it with Sam's ass." Forget helpful. I would've expected that type of comment and evil smirk from Dave, but usually Robby kept it a millimeter more civilized. I scowled at him.

As if she'd heard (and, fuck, maybe she had; my friends weren't exactly trying to keep their voices down), Sam's head flicked back over her shoulder. I refocused on Lena Crew before her eyes could meet mine, but the pause before she flipped her face forward again told me that she hadn't been fooled. Damn. I didn't need further complications. But… had that been a smile at the corner of her mouth? Did she also…? Huh. Maybe I shouldn't've looked away.

My friends took my silence as their cue to keep rambling.

"I mean," Robby said, scratching his head with an eyebrow shrug, "She made it pretty clear she didn't date…"

"But she never said anything about sex," Dave cut in with a grin.

"Come on," I interrupted. "She's a nerd. She'd be caught dead before she put on a pair of daisy dukes, and tryna convince a virgin to give it up? Not exactly my M.O. I mean, she just doesn't really send out that whole 'take me; I'm yours' vibe."

"That's not the way Taylor tells it," Dave said as he wiggled his brows, eyes sparking suggestively.

"What?" I snapped before I could stop myself. Damn. Well, no coming back from that one.

"Oh," Dave beamed, as if he hadn't been expecting (fucking hoping for) that response… dick. "Just saying you should keep in mind that she's also co-captain of the soccer team and that makes a girl pretty… athletic."

"No. What were you saying about the douchebag ex?"

"Stop it, Dave," Robby said, though he was smiling, too, the bastard. At least he was trying to hide it.

All Dave did was split a grin between the two of us. "He asked," he said with a little shrug.

I, however, was not appeased, and growled, "I'm gonna murder you both," an inch away from full seriousness.

"No need for violence," Dave protested. "Just, if you do end up banging the beautiful Miss Tucker, don't expect her to be all first-time flustered."

God. Not what I'd needed to know right then. How was I supposed to avoid staring at her ass with that teensy bit of information floating around my brain? (More like pounding a tidal wave of heat from my head to my heels and… yeah, everywhere in between). And how was I supposed to not go out and strangle this Taylor kid? And—

Wait, no. I wasn't into Sam like that; not at all. This was just Dave and Robby getting to me with all their ceaseless implications and proddings. I mean, shit, it'd been way too long since I'd gotten laid, and with this whole angsty mess surrounding Samantha Tucker… well, it must've gotten mixed up somewhere between my frontal lobe and hippocampus. Sam was not on the menu; hell, she wasn't even on the wine list.

"I'm not gonna bang her," I said, forcing the roll into my eyes as I glared across at Dave's dark widow's peak. "I'm the last person to deny that I've got the libido of a cat in heat, but, uh… Samantha Tucker isn't part of that equation."

"Really?" Dave smirked. "So who else you been fucking then?"

I actually managed to grin at that. "No way, dude. Real players know not to kiss and tell."

"Bullshit," Robby smiled, "You'd spill."

Dave just shook his head. "Whatever, man," he said, "I suppose it's all for the best since she's off limits anyway," and, tiring of the topic, he moved on to football things.

I kinda faded out — 'cause Dave's football talks all ended up in the same damn spot — and, a couple seconds later, caught myself staring at Sam's hips again. Oh, she was definitely a witch; I swear, the things had a magnetic pull.

"Ahem," a teacher, a vaguely familiar wisp of a man, coughed pointedly as he passed in the opposite direction.

Glancing up, I realized he was staring at me, one eyebrow raised in a way that said, "You're not as subtle as you think; now cut it out."

Dave and Robby waited until he was out of sight and then broke out laughing. They both slapped hands to my back.

"I guess Mr. McDonnel also noticed your complete lack of interest in Samantha Tucker's ass," Robby said, trying and failing to keep his face serious.

And what was there to say to that?

…

Dad came back late, stepping out of the darkness into the house like Santa Claus through the chimney, red-faced and puffed up with about a thousand coats. Except only a guy drunk out of his goddamn mind would call him "merry." He wasn't muttering exactly, but there was a low growl coming from his throat that musta been intimidating the fuck out of his vocal chords. For several moments, he just stood there, glaring at the coat rack like it had failed him in more ways than could ever be made comprehensible to its little, coat-rack mind, until I broke the silence by saying, "Geez, dad. Someone slash the tires or somethin'? 'Cause I could fry an egg on your face right now."

Dad huffed to indicate he'd heard but didn't glance over at my sofa stakeout as he kicked his boots into the corner with enough force to leave little mud streaks on these nice people's walls, and then, as he slowly shrugged out of his infinite, brown, coat shells, he began to speak.

"Bobby called about a potential haunting about an hour away," he grumbled in his irritated-old-man voice, "so I thought I'd go clean it up while waiting for this damn witch to drop her next hex bag." He was peeling coats with increased fervor now, face continuing to heat up like some jammed toaster. "But I get out there to this empty barn in the middle of — well, middle o' nowhere it seems — the place where this bastard's supposedly holing up, and what do I find but some goddamn girl sitting there reading. First I think maybe it's another ghost, but she doesn't have that washed-out look. Can't see her face, but there's a damn mess of very solid-looking brown hair on her head. 'Bout your age I think. And I was gonna wait her out, 'cept she won't leave. Two hours and she just sits there with her nose glued to the damn page. In an abandoned barn! What kinda book is that goddamn fascinating that she can't put it down for ten goddamn minutes to go take a piss or something so I can scope the place?!" He was tearing the coats off now like they'd done him some great personal wrong. "So I had to give up," he growled hotly, "and come back to make sure you hadn't blown up the stove or God knows what else while I was gone! And what is so goddamn funny?"

He'd looked up finally, eyes like the hot iron of train tracks after the engine goes by, and I realized I had a grin pasted onto my face like some three-year-old's art project — way too big and dumb-looking to be legal.

"Sorry," I said, not sorry at all and not trying to hide it, "I was just thinkin' how I might go about blowing up the stove next time you're gone."

He snorted and gave his shoes another solid, unnecessary kick.

Truth was, though, that dad's weird-ass, vexed-to-hell-and-back behavior was only half of what had me grinning like my brain had stopped developing in the fourth grade. The other half (probably more like five-sixths) had to do with the girl dad'd mentioned, who I was sure as shit would've had a pencil case labeled "Samantha Tucker" if dear dad had taken the time to look. Hell, she was probably still out there freezing her ass off in some redneck's abandoned barn while waiting for the ghost to show.

I could picture her. I'd watched her reading enough times to know that when she focused, she looked deeply troubled, the look that said, "Hmm... Now how should I go about dislodging this stick from my ass?" Not that I really thought of her like that anymore, but she looked uptight when she read. Her eyebrows pulled in to create the same two creases between them every single time. The doll lips sucked into a pinched pink, and she squinted like maybe she needed glasses. She didn't, but that's how she looked. It was goddamn adorable, and, after our last awesome fuck-up of a hunt together, I got a funny feeling of, I don't know, regret maybe, that she hadn't asked me to go with… not that there was any reason I should've expected her to.

It was about then, when I found myself tuning out dad's bear-like presence (finally freed from all his coats), and wishing that I was forty miles away in a dark, cold barn waiting on a vindictive dead guy to come and try and beat my brains out instead of here in this warm and comfy house, that the small feely-weely parts of my grapefruit convinced the much larger and more stubborn portion that Sam was more than a bitchy chick to me, more than another hunter, more than a sweet piece of ass (though she was that). She was… Well, I liked her I guess. Okay, I'll say it: I liked her.

And I made up my mind, there and then, stretched out on top of my good friend the sofa, that I was gonna track my nerdy girl down and we were gonna talk. And I sure as hell wasn't gonna say any shit about Gina fucking Andrews this time.

…

It'd always been easy to find Sam before, but now that I actually wanted to corner the bitch and have a chat, it was like Peter Pan had come and whisked her off to fucking Neverland or some crap. And when I did manage to spot her elusive brown mop, she was being swarmed by like a hundred other nerds or soccer chicks or whoever, and the only way I would've actually gotten my own piece of Sam's precious time would be to whack my way through the masses with a hockey stick. Satisfying, but not gonna go over so well with the school administration or my dear old man.

So instead I ended up just kinda hovering around like one of Sam's higher energy electrons, in a far-out shell, but way, way more buzzed than the closer kids in the cloud… whenever I could shake Dave and Robby that is. When Sam noticed, she'd meet my eyes and glare in a way that felt more like an affectionate shoulder punch than a jaw-knocker. Other times she'd smile a bit and glance away really quick because girls are fucking weird like that, and I couldn't be sure if I was being a bit liberal with my interpretations of those looks, molding them how I wanted, or if the old saying was true and all roads really did lead to "Fuck yeah!"

I sure hoped so. More, I hoped that I could just talk to her.

Dave and Robby, though, weren't quite as dumb as they looked, and they teased me like no fucking other. Even worse was the teacher, the same guy who'd called me out on staring at Sam's ass in the first place. He kept popping up like a mole from the hallway floors at a bunch of really bad moments… like when my mouth was stuck a tiny bit open as Sam bent to pick up her friend's pencil, which'd fallen on the floor, and the back of her shirt was sliding up her spine towards the ground because of that oh-so-magical force called gravity, and I thought I might've caught the edges of a tattoo there on her lower back, which was way un-fucking-fair… or that other time when she'd just swung through the door into the lady's room and I was stopped in the hall looking after. Really creepy shit, and I wanted to tell him it wasn't like that, but all I could do was go a bit pink — a manly pink — as his mouth turned down into a tiny thinking frown and his eyes lectured me on respect for the opposite sex.

I finally recognized him as the AP Lit teacher from my first-day mix-up, and, about the same time, I finally realized how to catch Sam. I'd go to one of her classes when it got out, before she had the chance to hook up with another member of her persistent friend cloud, and walk her to the next period. A good five minute talk.

Except it didn't pan out that way.

"Hi… uh, is Sam here?"

It was a totally dumbass question because I could see all four fucking walls and she obviously wasn't there. It was just the teacher, the one that hated me, Mr. McSomething, glancing up as he transferred files from his desk to his bag.

"No, she left already," he said with an amused smile, raising his head slightly to indicate the distinctly unoccupied desks.

"Right," I laughed, a totally awkward laugh, like the air was tripping out of my lungs. "Dumb question. Sorry."

I turned to leave, but the teacher guy (damn him) started talking again.

"Hey," he said, and I looked back to where he was straightening up, pale light catching the dull brown of his hair like a half-hearted halo. It made him look like some kinda dorky, small-town angel, which would've been intimidating if he wasn't so… well… unintimidating. He smiled with closed lips, eyes apologetic but firm. "You're the one who's just staying for a few weeks, right?"

"Right," I nodded. There were a few light pricks of anxiety in my stomach by this point; nothing serious, but I mean, where the hell was this going?

He nodded along with me. "Have you _ever_ stayed in a school for longer than a few weeks?"

With my eyebrows raised in an unspoken, "Why?" and my hand still hovering on the doorknob, I said, "One time I stayed about two months, but, uh, yeah, for the most part a few weeks is about right."

"That must be hard. In lots of ways, but definitely grade-wise."

Oh, so this was gonna be _that_ kinda talk. My mouth tilted in what I hoped was a charming smile, although, you know, I didn't feel all that charming right then. I wanted to say, "Fuck off, Mr. Something-or-Other," but what came out my mouth instead (because, believe it or not, I do have some self-control) was: "I already have a one-hundred-percent-guaranteed full-time occupation waiting for me, and it doesn't require being able to list Sacagawea's grandchildren. No offense."

"I'm an English teacher," he smiled back, "so none taken, and although it is speculated that Sacagawea may have had two children, certainly one, neither of them had offspring of their own, leaving her, sadly, grandchild-less… in case that information ever does become pertinent to your future career."

"Uh… thanks."

"My pleasure," he nodded. "However, you didn't come looking for a dead Shoshone woman; you came looking for Samantha, and Samantha, as you might be aware, intends to go to college. Given her course-selection, grades, test scores, and extracurricular activities, a very good one at that. She has a bright future."

It took me a second to work out why he was telling me this. When I did put the pieces together, all I could do was open my mouth… and then close it. Not that I'd ever admit to it, but I could feel the heat boiling up under my cheeks. The guy was still smiling, like I was some fucking pity case and he was trying to be super polite about it, but my mental translation was: "Samantha Tucker is, and always will be, out of your league. You're a nobody and always will be a nobody. She's a somebody and is only going to become more of a somebody, so save everybody a heart attack and back off now."

Damn. That left me in a bit of a mental void, so all I said was, "I know," and hoped that the heat under my skin wasn't speaking too loudly over me.

"Good," he smiled, the brown of his eyes still lit in a soft apology as he gathered the last of his papers together. "So… any idea where you're headed next?"

I mumbled some crap about rolling west and then high-tailed it out of there. God, it was stuffier than an Alabama greenhouse in that room. Damn near impossible to breathe. The hallway smelled like a department store — hell of a lot more cologne in the air than could be healthy — but at least it was thin enough to get down my trachea without choking to death.

So Sam was gonna be some big-shot lawyer, huh? Doctor, engineer, senator, CEO? Someone with her nose stuck so high in the air she'd never see her own toes? Someone with a social circle that had the radius of a neutrino in terms of its diversity? So fuck her. She'd been a bitch from the start, screwed with my head for a week or two, but now I was calling it quits. No more mind games. No more Sam.

I strolled down the hallway at a casual pace until I ran into Dave, who was chatting up two very un-Sam-like chicks. He leaned back against the hallway wall between two large science posters, one titled "The Chemistry of Love," and the other less creatively labeled, "Pleasure Circuits in the Brain." Huh. My lips jerked up in a dry smirk as Chica Numero Uno took a step closer to Dave. They were definitely breaking the old "Leave room for the Holy Spirit" rule. Girl Two was also smiling, though with a more strained stretch of her too-red lips, because she was obviously the third wheel in the picture. Both chicks had on low-slung skinny jeans and loose, but semi-see-through tops. Something told me they weren't planning on becoming neurosurgeons any time soon.

Stirring a thick dollop of honey into my smile, I sidled up beside my good ol' buddy Dave with a corny, but tried-and-true, "Hey there, ladies."

Dave grinned at me for a quick second before turning back to the girl who was making a determined go at climbing up his torso.

"Teresa, d'you know Dean?" he asked.

Teresa smiled at me fleetingly. "I think I've seen you around, but, uh, not really."

"Nice to meet you, Teresa," I grinned back.

She nodded, taking the tiniest of steps away from Dave as she realized that maybe it wouldn't be such a good idea to try and jump his pants with two on-looking witnesses.

"And this is Rhonda," Dave continued, dipping his head towards the girl with the overdone lip-gloss.

Rhonda's grin was a lot broader than Teresa's when her black eyes met mine. "Hi, Dean," she chimed, swinging around the other two to stand by me.

Damn. The girl had only said two words and it was already clear as ketchup she was flirting.

Dave laughed. "Tone it down, Rhonda," he said, smirking between the two of us. "Dean's too busy crushing on Samantha Tucker to hook up right now."

Rhonda's nose crinkled as she thought. "Samantha? Isn't she, like, that really smart girl?"

My snort was dry enough to soak up the Nile. Seemed like everybody knew Sam was out of my league. "Yeah," I said, "Smart. But not a player in my ballgame if you catch my drift." I shot an irritated look Dave's way. "That little bastard is just making trouble."

"So you're single," Rhonda clarified with an amused smile, planting her hands shockingly low (okay, gotta admit I wasn't really that shocked) on her denim-hugged hips.

I let my eyes be guided downwards by the gesture, sizing her up. Dark curly hair. Decent boobs and hips. Nothing on S—

Forget that. She was perfect. Perfect for what she wanted to do with me anyway.

I slid my eyes back to hers with a cocky smile. "Definitely single."

In my peripheral vision, I could see Dave's eyebrows flick upwards, but I didn't turn to look, and he evidently got over his disbelief or amusement or whatever it was pretty quick as Teresa closed the gap between them again and sopped up the last of his attention.

Rhonda beamed at me. "Surprise, surprise, so am I."

"Thought you might be. Though with a girl so pretty, I gotta say it's a crime."

The red smudges of her lips curled further. "I live on the edge."

Oh, I was _so_ gonna get laid tonight.

…

It wasn't the next day, but the day after when I finally ran into the new Sam... the Sam who knew I'd banged Rhonda Hurley.

I'll admit that I'd been being a goddamn child about it and going way out of my way to avoid her after my happy little chat with Mr. McDonnel. I'd memorized her schedule from the early days when tailing her was a dad-imposed duty, so it wasn't hard to work out the back roads I'd have to take to swing it… stomp through the lower corridor where the freshman sprouted like mushrooms on the dust-grained floorboards, or maybe like knee-high, talking sewage that I had to trudge through, and then back up the stairs to reach my destinations. I ended up stepping into a classroom once when her ugly mug made an unanticipated appearance, the little desk-dwelling bastards giving me funny looks like I was the leaning tower of fucking Pisa, and then one uppity girl asked: "Did you get held back? You look kinda old to be in this class."

I flipped her off, peered through the tiny glass window set into the industrial-grade door to make sure my bitchy little problem had shimmied her ass out of sight, and then ducked out myself, back into the morning-dazed herd of students.

But (because my luck is crap) I couldn't avoid a run-in forever, and, when it happened… well, it wasn't gonna make a Norman Rockwell painting any time soon; that's for sure. I was ten feet away, but she swung around me like I didn't exist, like I was a fucking ghost, except scratch that 'cause she would've at least paid a ghost enough attention to roast its ass. And shit, did that mean I was worse than dead to her? Talk about maturity issues. But, you know, I guess it's not super mature to screw the class slut (no offense, Rhonda) just because you're mad either… or feeling worthless… or stupid or whatever the hell it'd been, like some pathetic kind of ego boost.

I was still pissed, though, and she was too, 'cause when she breezed past, her expression was Montreal in mid-January: those fucking doll lips pursed-up like a goddamn codex, eyes frozen to toad-colored river rocks, but still so big and so hazel, and she had those ridiculously soft-looking eyelashes that made me want to rip them out, or maybe run my thumb across them instead, or just get up way into her personal space and stare.

Things like that are hard to tell apart sometimes. But fuck, a chick should not've been able to do that to my stomach, make it squeeze up like a drying oyster or a shriveling carcass or a raisin or something equally "eww"-inducing. My stomach felt very "eww." In fact, my feet felt "eww" too, and so did my brain and my elbows and this little spot under my sternum.

Sam was Montreal in mid-January and I felt "eww" and there was no reason to stay after that. So, when I got home, I spun dad my story about overhearing some drunk dude in town bragging about how he'd staked a witch, the locals laughing or subtly sidling away from him, and then I prayed that dad would buy it and we could just turn tail and get the hell out of Columbine.


	7. A Night in the Lonesome October

**Kudos to you if you get the title reference (It's one of my favorite books).  
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CHAPTER 7: A NIGHT IN THE LONESOME OCTOBER

Dad didn't like my story at all, and he had no reservations about saying so.

"I don't like this."

Then there were a buncha suspicious looks. He shot them my way from under dark and glowering eyebrows, forehead pinched in a hundred different places, but there was no way to know if that suspicion was directed at me or if it was a more general bug in his soup and he was just chucking it into my lap 'cause I was the nearest available target. Dad was that kinda guy.

With his arms folded into his ribcage and his feet gouging the Oregon Trail out of the kitchen tiles, he repeated, "I don't like this."

I shrugged and fought to keep my eyes from wandering back to the half-eaten plate of meatballs sitting on the table next to me. I swear they were doing their damnedest to seduce my nostrils, and it was working (saliva output had hit ceiling production levels about three minutes back), but instead I forced my gaze to stick to Dad's huffy shoulders and said, "That's what the guy said."

Dad made a new pass along his tile trail and gave me another unnecessary eye-full of skepticism. "I don't like it." Yeah, I'd gotten that the first two times. "I want to check it out before we let this go." He pointed a thick finger at my chest like I'd been arguing. I mean, geez, had I said a word against it? Could he tone down the hostility a notch or two, maybe?

But, yeah, no. I was seventeen and so I could probably measure the trust he had in me using a micrometer. That said, no we weren't gonna be leaving just yet, and worse, Dad was gonna try to find this hunter guy I'd been talking about, who (small problem) didn't exist.

And if Dad found _that_ out… Well… at least there are girls in the afterlife, right?

So, basically, with my dear old man acting like that menopausal sophomore English teacher I had that one time in Stockton and Sam acting not much better and Dave and Robby being just about as unsympathetic as two fucks can be, Halloween and the slutty outfits it entailed were really the only bright spots on the sorry-ass horizon of my life. That's why, even knowing the Bitch was gonna be there, I'd taken my two buddies up on their secondhand invitation to some chick's party. Halloween party. And now it was nine o'clock on haunt-town night with the air like the murky waters of the Mississippi in winter and just as cold. Candle flames shivered inside a few vagabond jack-o-lanterns on the blue-washed steps that led up to the door of the girl's, Jacky's, house, and the door itself was a timid fucker, cowering deep in its frame. The wind had turned into a hag with gastric trouble and wouldn't stop moaning... loud... and the darkness seemed to shift about like it was clotting. All in all, it was one creepy-ass night — really got me in the whole death-and-devastation holiday mood — but when we got inside, it turned out not a single one of the guests had bothered to put on a costume. Kinda killed the creepiness to have thirty or so teenagers lounging on floors and couches in jeans and t-shirts like this was every other Tuesday. Seriously, who did they think they were?

That's when I spotted Caroline, that red-headed girl that I'd seen just the one time at the AP lit screw-up, seemingly the only kid here with any type of sense. She had on a very tall, very pointy witch hat, and I shot her a sly thumbs up. Other than that, the sole indication that it was Halloween at all was the candy. Big bags of it slouched all over like beer-bellied old men. The packaging exploded with color, advertising all the five-hundred ways they'd found to rename sugar.

As the three of us made it all the way into the living room, the candy-corn hue of the light burnished a gaggle of unfamiliar heads with orangey halos. Except there was also that one head I recognized only too well. Luckily she hadn't seen me yet. Jacky did, though, and, perky hostess that she was, bounced over with a beer-and-MilkyWay-scented laugh.

"Hi, guys!" she bubbled, and she pumped my hand brightly when she realized I was a new face… fresh meat.

"Hi," she beamed for the second time, "I'm Jacky."

"Dean," I smiled back, letting her have my hand until I decided it was only the alcohol keeping her at it and not her happy-go-lucky personality, at which point I took it into my head to gently rescue my fingers before she shook all the blood loose. As expected, she didn't seem to notice or care, pink cheeks winking happily under her blonde ponytail.

"Sorry we didn't wait for you to crack the beer," she burbled on, "but we figured we had to start early or you'd down it all without us." She patted Dave's arm, no real accusation in the blue baubles of her eyeballs, and then dragged the three of us into the heart of the room.

When Sam finally noticed my stage-stopping presence, she took an extra-long swig of beer, so that I couldn't be sure whether it was me or the drink causing her cheeks to turn that color. Then we set down to ignoring each other… mostly. Every couple minutes I'd glance over, just a really quick thing to make sure she wasn't staring at me, and if she wasn't, I'd look a little bit longer to make sure she didn't start. Of course, looking made her look back, and then we'd both awkwardly jerk away to examine the room's murkier corners and sip our beers.

Caroline, it turned out, was a total lightweight, and she was giggling at her own fingernails by halfway through bottle number two. By number four she was colored like some fuckin' tomato and the only reason she wasn't tipping off the couch was because she was being propped up by Jacky and some other guy who I didn't know like she was a bean stalk — an unusually loopy and redheaded beanstalk.

I was noting the changes religiously to avoid looking at Sam, but it was getting harder as the alcohol level in my blood hiked its way towards tipsy, and when my eyes began to itch, they just kinda dug her out of the crowd. She was sitting on the floor with her back to the couch, resting against some girl's legs and letting her bangs shade out her face like super-villains do in movies when they want to be extra mysterious for some reason. I started thinking of her legs as the trails of dripping caramel that oozed from broken chocolates, just getting longer and longer the longer you waited... and, under all that damn denim, probably caramelly in color, too... and maybe taste. Except that's totally not where this was going.

But anyway, by beer six, Caroline was insisting, with sloppy, half-yelled gesticulations, that we play Ten Fingers or else suffer her nerd-filled wrath. Everybody who was more sober than her (which was, yeah, everybody) groaned, 'cause you gotta know that's not a game you play once you've escaped the hell-pit of eighth grade. I mean… beer pong, anybody? But Caroline had her freckle-bloodied cheeks and her spike-like witch hat, which tipped wildly along with her head to stab neighbors in the face every time she moved, and she was just crazy enough that the threat of her wrath seemed plausible… so eventually she won.

Even though we were the only ones in the whole damn house, for some reason people felt the need to huddle up like we had to keep it all secret, and we ended up in a sloppy, very tight-pressed, and pretty overheated ring. Between the squished-up bodies, I was surprised that everyone managed to wiggle their hands into the middle without losing thumbs and pinkies, but they did, and then we looked more cult-like than ever 'cause nothing screams "séance" like a heap of angst-ridden seniors with open palms in a dim-lit room on Halloween night. Nothing satanic about that at all.

I'd have carpet burns and muscle cramps in the morning (on top of sweat-stained clothes 'cause, seriously, Dave was way too close), but, much as I hate to say it, there was actually something kinda thrilling about it all. One, big, sugar-high circle of people my age about to play some dumb game that would potentially leave us with emotional scars and heart-stopping regrets for the rest of forever. I mean, I was down; wouldn't you be?

Especially when I caught Sam's eyes across the circle, spread and unpolished nails glowing a vaguely tangerine-ish color, and my mind took a crazy dip. Just what had Sam done in her geek girl little life? If I wanted to know, I was never gonna get a better chance to find out.

Caroline started, of course, and, despite the alcohol steadily rolling her towards the doors of the loony bin, she had the sense to kick it off slow. Her curls jumped down her arms like electrocuted red snakes, and she announced, "Never have I ever gotten a tattoo," and then whipped her head around at everybody else's hands to see who'd been knocked down a finger.

Three people, it turned out: a guy and girl I didn't know… and Sam.

I swallowed. Suctioned between two other dudes, the heat waves that'd been grumbling between us suddenly seemed to boil to a volcanic temperature, which was a helluva lot too hot. But I mean, I was a guy… it was totally normal to wonder where… especially since it wasn't visible with all her clothes on.

Apparently my surprise was shared because, when the initial rush of blood cleared from my ears, a girl named Donna was saying, "Wait, Sam, you have a tattoo? Whe—" She cut herself off with an apologetic twitch of her lips. "—What is it?"

Dave jarred me in the ribs and grinned at Sam as he said, "_Where_ is it?"

"Why don't you show us?" a different dude suggested.

And, without thinking, just an automatic type of call-and-response thing, I said, "Come on. Nothing to hide, right?"

Sam's eyebrows strayed to the line of her bangs. The hazel irises below were dark in the candy-corn light, and I thought I saw the tiniest flicker of a smile etch across her school-girl lips. Was she looking at me? It was hard to tell in the orange haze of the room. But she was, wasn't she. My mouth went dry because, as it turned out, she was just drunk enough to go along with it, and, wobbling to her feet, supporting herself using an unappreciative neighbor's head, her other hand reached for the hem of her long-sleeved shirt and she turned her back into the circle. Then the fabric began to hitch up.

For a hot second I got the crazy idea that she was about to strip, which sent my mind spinning ten kinds of high and a little shiver tumbling down my abdomen. All I could do was stare with widening eyes as the expanse of tan skin and the swooping sides of her hips grew and grew… and then I could see it. Way lower on her back than could possibly be within legal codes for a chick who was already so smoking there was a pentagram encompassed by flames. Black and burning and situated among all that satin skin, an inch or two above a mole that was going to be imprinted on my retinas for the rest of forever.

Had I said my mouth was dry before? Screw that. Now it was the fucking Sahara.

Next to me, Dave applauded and some other guy whistled. Sam dropped her shirt and plopped back down with a deeper blush and a grin as her eyes suckered to the floor.

"Demonic," Donna slurred appreciatively, "What's it mean?"

Sam shrugged. "Fuck if I know."

Damn. Alcohol did that girl good; drunk, she sure as hell wasn't blabbing a crap-load of SAT junk, and I could kinda pretend that I wasn't standing four, unscalable floors below.

Except then it got to be Sam's turn, and, with a smirk at a few particular friends, she announced, "Never have I ever taken a regular level math class."

The others groaned good-naturedly and chucked candy at her for being a total lame-o, which she couldn't completely dodge and some of it got lodged in the thick tangles of her hair, but I felt the heat clawed out of my stomach by a pair of icy talons. Could she really not stick to the typical smutty stuff? I mean, we were a quarter of the way through the circle and I was already six fingers down ('cause, seriously, what hadn't I done?), but oh no, Samantha Tucker was above all that crap, of course. No doubt it rubbed her delicate sensibilities the wrong way 'cause, tattoo or not, we all knew that underneath the act dear Miss Perfect was a prude.

By the time it got around to me, I was out of fingers, but I still didn't hesitate to stare straight into that bitch's eyes and say, "Never have I ever slept with a tattooed chick."

And, of course, her eyes flashed from neutral to plasma-hot in half a second and there was only the slightest trace of drunk left in her movements when she shoved to her feet and slammed out of the room. I followed, God-only-knows why, but it was like I was tied to her by some fucking puppet string, and I knew she was expecting me to. As soon as we were out of the living room, far enough that the twenty plus pairs of eyes that had studiously not watched us leave wouldn't hear, she spun around in a whirlwind of razor-blade, brunette hair, arms snapping across her chest into a crisscross so tight she must've been cutting off circulation, and she hissed, "Is everything about sex to you?"

I cocked my head at her, the smirk knotting across my lips as cold as her eyes were hot, but I didn't say anything and that was okay because she obviously didn't want me to; she just carried on, "'Cause I'm not gonna be just one more notch in your fuck game."

"Who said I wanted to fuck you, honey?" I said. No way in the nine rings of hell was I apologizing. It was her fucking fault. "Just 'cause you've got a fucking four point O," I rasped on, "and you're good at soccer or some shit doesn't mean you're at the top of everybody's list. It's not like you're the goddamn queen of the world; you're just one more girl from a piece-o'-crap town that nobody's gonna remember."

"That's exactly what I'm talking about," she snapped back, and I imagined that this was probably what she looked like when she was about to chop off some vampire's head, deadly and bordering on uncontrolled, "You don't give a shit about other people's feelings. Gina and Rhonda and God knows who else, just more girls to fuck and forget. You won't remember them in a month, but you think it makes you oh so magnificent to be able to get in their pants for a night!"

"And this is what I'm talking about! You think because you're smart you get to lecture me on morality. Like you're better somehow. You just hide it better 'cause you're caught up on what other people think. I may not be in advanced classes, but that doesn't make me some sort of fucking idiot."

"I never said you were! I just… you're such a fucking coward; that's what you are!"

"Oh, I'm the coward? Are we forgetting who saved who from the big, scary monster in the woods?"

"Not that type of coward," she groaned. "Fuck, you're worse. You're too afraid of getting hurt to go for it."

"Go for what," I sneered.

She glared at me and opened her mouth to snap something fiery back, but then she just kept staring, and the heat drained from her cheeks, and, still staring directly at me, the hazel in her eyes opening the deepest of tunnels through the electric air between us, she said, "Dean, I don't know why, and I don't…" She trailed off and let her mouth hover open, lips fluttering as the words huddled back into the recesses of her throat, but she forced them out, and then her lips were moving in distinct patterns again and she said, "I like you, and I thought—" Again she had to fight with her tongue, but, like the first time, she eventually won. "—thought you liked me, too."

Sam's eyes were huge and afraid and bordered with beads of defensiveness waiting to close back in... but she didn't take it back. She stood there and stared and waited for me to say something. But I couldn't. What, a week? Two? I was gonna have my ass hauled off to who-knew-where and she would be left here, and if I said... if... then I knew some piece of me would be staying, too. Alcohol and endorphins and anger were wiring through my brain like thick cords of copper energy, but she was right and I was a coward and I couldn't do it.

So I turned around and fled the house before I could catch the end of the palm-dulled choking sound she was making.

I found a backdoor out of Jacky's house and tumbled into the thickening blood of the darkness. I didn't run, but I walked fast, really fast, and within twenty minutes I was standing alone in the tiny park in the center of town. With the trees staring down, and the sky low and wailing, everything around me was cold and empty and black. But I couldn't see any of it because there was still that tattoo soldered through my optic nerves, and, even if I was leaving, I had a feeling that the damage she'd done to my sensory system wouldn't be scabbing over any time soon.

…or the damage she'd done to that dumb muscle under my sternum.


	8. Saving People, Hunting Things

**I know it's getting old here, but once again I'm sorry for how long it takes me to write and post these things, and I swear it'll all speed up mid-June (unless I get arrested for copyright infringement or something :P). I'm sure all y'all in the American educational system understand the hell pit that is May, and thus my dilemma.**

**On to better things… I realized that I don't think I ever did a disclaimer for this story, so for now I'ma stick it in here…**

**Disclaimer: Pretty sure all y'all know this, but I don't own Supernatural or any of its characters; they belong to the CW (or the WB) and Eric Kripke and whoever else. I'm not making any money off of this.  
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**Finally, after this chapter, I'm really going to try to get back to All Alone Again for a bit, so I almost definitely won't post anything more until mid- to late-June. That could be a lie, I might get carried away with this story, but I've been seriously neglecting All Alone Again and think it deserves a bit of attention. I promise, though, that I am still writing this story. I have plans for it. I have some future parts written. It cannot be stopped!**

**(Okay, actually finally…) Thank you so much to all y'all who've reviewed! You are the best; I love reviews, and really, I wouldn't mind if you have non-positive things to say (not that I don't love the flattery!) But please, if you have anything to tell me at all, review! Even if it is just to complain about the way I write Sam… (Or that it's really lame that I copped out of writing an actual hunt scene for this chapter... or that my author's notes are way too goddamn long)… just let me know why (about hating Sam, not the author's notes). I would really like to improve my writing, and to do that I need to know what works AND what doesn't. Also, thank you to all of you who have followed and favorited this story, and to everyone who continues to read it even without consistent updates. Stay strong! Stay classy!  
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**Sorry. Now story time…**

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CHAPTER 8: SAVING PEOPLE, HUNTING THINGS

I'd been moping on the couch for the whole week Dad'd been looking for the non-existent hunter. I would've moped in my room except then he would've known for sure something was fucked up in the great Nation of Dean, and the last thing I wanted was some sort of father-son heart-to-heart where both of us would end up examining each other's pores for an hour so we could pretend we weren't actually talking. Let me tell you, there were a lotta better things to do with an hour than stare at Dad's pores. But, even with me in my natural habitat on the sofa, Dad was beginning to give me funny looks every time he walked into the room. He hadn't asked anything… yet (for which I was duly grateful), but I could tell he was working up to it. That was bad. Like I said, not exactly down for skin blemish studies.

Dave and Robby, who unlike Dad _did_ know more-or-less what the issue was, had generally respected my unspoken — though still clearly communicated — taboo on the topic… But not entirely.

After the _Night of All Doom_, Dave's first words to me had been, "You're an idiot and a jerk." He'd been digging through his locker when he'd said it, totally casual, so I knew he wasn't gonna de-friend me or anything.

Robby had patted my arm, and grunted, "What Dave said," and then they'd let it go.

But no way could _I_ let it go. I mean, I'd tried. When moping failed, I'd gone in for all that girly shit: forty minute showers, chocolate ice cream, TV. Hell, I'd even hooked up with Rhonda again — which, just FYI, I'm not proud of — and, no, it didn't work.

Truth was, I'd had it drop-dead right when I'd been standing alone in that dark park on Halloween night: Sam wasn't a scar; she was an open wound, and damn if it didn't hurt like fuck all.

It hurt worse 'cause I hadn't expected it. I mean, I thought I knew girls as well as I knew poker, and I'd found I could play both games like a seriously slick son-of-a-bitch. I'd heard from mountains of chicks how hot I was, that they loved me, that they wanted me to stay forever and ever and _ever_ and be their Prince Charming boyfriend, and all that was pretty sweet to hear ('cause who doesn't long for a good bit of flattery?), but — to bare my heart here for a quick sec — none of that had slammed me down the stairs like Sam's reluctant: "I like you." I don't know when "like" became a bigger punch to the gut than "love" or "forever" or "hold me" or whatever the fuck those girls had said, but I was sure as Shirley Temple that it'd overtaken the rest of the pack somewhere along the line 'cause there I was on the couch, simmering in self-pity like a prepubescent bitch with third-degree acne, and I swear on all my man parts that I'd never done _that_ before.

Anyway, all told, I was as relieved as Matthew McConaughey was when the drug charges were dropped when Dad stormed into the living room one morning and grunted, "Headin' to Bobby's. Says he's got a spell to locate this sucker."

As part of my magnificently failing charade, I forced my spine into a semi-straight position and said, "Oh yeah? How's it work?" Like I cared. There was no witch to be found.

Dad gave me the suspicious look. It dipped under his lowered eyebrows like some animal emerging from its burrow and tried to bite me. Yes, his eyes could bite. "I don't know," he growled, "Why d'you think I'm going to Bobby's?"

I managed an eye roll at that, prompting him to sigh and then (reluctantly) provide, "If there's a witch in a ten-mile radius, this should let us know. That way, if all this is a waste of our damn time, we can be completely sure we're not leaving some mess behind that we'll just have to come clean up later."

"Huh," I nodded. "Sounds good." — though, you know, not so much really.

He nodded, and although I was looking at the TV, I could tell he was still examining me with his puff-lipped frown. I thought that maybe this would be the moment he'd call me out on my post-menstrual issues, but all he said was: "Don't blow up the oven," before grabbing his coat and sweeping out.

As soon as he was gone, I let the breath I'd been half-holding slide away and flicked off the TV. Then I set to staring at the walls. Previously, I'd thought they were sage-colored, or thyme-colored, or some other witchy, smelly little herb. Now I was going with moldy Wonder bread. Let me tell you, if there is one thing that does absolutely nothing to improve a sour mood, it's walls that look like moldy Wonder bread.

Luckily, I only got to put myself through a rigorous three hours of wall-staring before the phone rang. Why Dad'd be calling so soon escaped me, but if he was, I figured it had to be a damn sight more important than complaints about the traffic, so I heaved myself off the couch, rolling my eyes for real this time, and humphed over to lift the chunky lump of off-white plastic to my ear.

Without waiting for any type of greeting, I said, "I'm sorry, but I just couldn't restrain myself in the — what? — two hours since you left? And the oven's gone now. Blown to smithereens."

"What?"

Oh. Not dad.

"Uh…" the voice continued immediately, "No clue what that was supposed to mean, but I didn't get it."

Recollecting myself with a little eyebrow shrug, I said, "Who's this?"

"Robby."

Good to know. "Heya, Robby. Not exactly expecting you to call. Only chicks call each other; you know that, right?" I flopped back onto the couch. "Anyway, what's up?"

"Um…" Robby began, voice going a bit sandy-gritty, "so this is awkward, but it seems like we've reverted to middle school here and nobody can actually work up the balls to just go out and talk to the people they need to talk to to make this whole thing work out like it's s'posed to, so here we are passing notes like—"

"Dude," I cut in, "the hell are you talking about?"

He cleared his throat with an almost inaudible and very defensive, "I was getting there," before he switched back to normal volume and said, "Okay, so here's the deal. Sasha told Jacky to tell Dave to tell you this; except Dave's a total pussy and wouldn't, so now I'm telling you."

Do you have any idea how frustrating it was that he wouldn't just say it? Well, it was really freakin' frustrating, and even baseline frustration is worse than having a political party of ghouls campaigning in your stomach, so I gotta say I sounded pretty ticked off when I snapped out, "_What_ are you telling me?"

"Okay… um… I'm just gonna say this."

"Yeah. Don't let me stop you."

He cleared his throat again for good measure. "Right, so both you and Sam are being idiots. You obviously like each other, and now you're both miserable, and I don't know exactly what went down on Halloween, but all of us — meaning Sasha, Caroline, Jacky, Lorie, me, and yeah, Dave, too — all of us agree that whatever it was, it was stupid, and since it was most likely your fault, you gotta be the man here and go fix it."

"I'm not miserable," I protested, ignoring the rest of his statement.

"Shut up," Robby said, "Yes, you are."

"I'm not! I'm just…" But words had never really come to me when I needed them.

"Pining," Robby filled in, "You're pining, and you're miserable, and we're all sick of it, so get out there and fix your crap."

He didn't stick around after that. He hung up so that I couldn't respond, and I mumbled into the dead line, "Go fix your own crap," but, you know, even I knew that was lame.

When I stopped avoiding Sam in the hallways (which I can't say I did right off the bat after the _Night of All Doom_ and that lovely chat with Robby Dearest and all), but when I did, I realized straight away that Sam had gone back to being Ice Woman. It was like nothing had changed since before Halloween… except now I held Robby's secret knowledge that, however invisible from the outside, we were both sad, wet dogs underneath the backpacks and increasingly thick padding of winter jackets.

Still, I don't think I would've worked up the balls to do anything about it at all ('cause, seriously, that girl's angry face could cut diamond), except that I saw her ice-sculpture exterior melt for a second, and the wet dog shone through (or seeped through, or whatever). It was one of the most pathetic things I've ever had the good fortune to lay eyes on. Her eyebrows curved up in the middle like a collapsing teepee with this tiny worried crease between them; the purse of her lips lost its usual bitchy edge; and her eyes went all mooey-gooey — and, no, I'm not into mooey-gooey crap, but I think it's ingrained somewhere in the human brain that you've gotta help something that makes an expression like that, and (much as I generally consider myself above the common populace) I wasn't gonna be the exception that proved this rule. My internal organs all let out an aggravated sigh, and my liver said to my right kidney, "Well, I guess we're goin' in for a pound then."

But, being me, I wasn't about to, like, just walk up and ask her out. God, no! I had a _way_ better plan. Totally fail-safe, and a bazillion light-years cooler, too. It involved stealing the journal that obsessive-compulsive Mrs. Neat Freak practically had sewn to her arm. I had a pretty strong hunch that that was where she put down all her hunting info and research and whatever, like dad's journal, and so the plan was this: get the book; work out her killing itinerary; drop in when she's gearing up to take down one of those fugly bastards, and thus render myself temporarily indispensable. She wouldn't be able to turn down help when there were lives on the line, and so I'd get my golden-egg opportunity.

Of course, once in, it was up to my astounding wit and improv skills to actually hold an audience and win back fair lady's favor. But, come on, I'd been the King of Charm since I was six fucking years old! It was gonna go down like clockwork.

So… Friday afternoon, with the sun shining like an over-cooked egg yolk and the wind-chill factor steadily working its way towards lethal, I made the grab. Sam was coming out of the math and science building, chatting with a friend of hers that I thought might be named Lorie but couldn't be sure. Honestly, I didn't really care. Sam's normally tan skin was chapped in patches, alternatingly pale and apple-colored, cheeks blushing like Pippi Longstocking or those other weird drawings of Swedish girls in pigtails. The brick of the building behind her looked chapped, too, but I'm willing to admit that that one might've been my imagination.

Anyway, she was skipping down the front steps like school was the best thing since carbonated water, not glancing at the spot where I was subtly lurking behind a group of juniors on the quad. I was squatting a little to blend in better, and the weirded-out stares that the juniors were giving me let me know that I looked exactly as ridiculous as I felt. But hey, at least Sam hadn't seen me. That was Goal #1 of this operation, so I was gonna consider it a success so far.

When she got to the paved path cutting across the quad's lawn, another friend fell into step beside her and the-girl-who-might've-been-Lorie, and I felt safe ditching my new junior friends to sneak up behind the now fully-formed nerd pack. They were having a very serious discussion about college apps and didn't notice me at all, but Sam's backpack bounced in a little jig as she walked, like it was trying to avoid my hands or maybe tattletale to its mama (by which I mean Sam, of course). I got the sucker eventually, though. Ha! With the zipper pinched between my fingers like it was a newborn baby, I wheedled the pouch open and lifted out my prize. Then I zipped it back up real quick and slowed my pace to widen the gap between me and the geek gang. I checked to see if anybody'd noticed, but no one had… or else they just didn't care. Not their problem after all. I allowed myself a small satisfied smirk — because, come on, that was pretty darn cool — and then I pocketed the journal and began the slog home.

Once seated in the kitchen with a bowl of soup beside me and the journal spread out across the little, wooden table, I realized that it was pretty much the polar opposite of Dad's journal. Dad's journal was made out of a sheet of leather that'd undoubtedly come from the thickest-skinned, meanest cow this side of the Mississippi, and it was packed to bursting with sticky notes and loose sheets, pages crammed with the man's nearly incomprehensible scrawl and decidedly incomprehensible doodles; on top of that, it always had a slightly resentful look to it, like it'd been sat on one-too-many times and had now come to the conclusion that all people were dicks. Eh, it might've been right, but that didn't mean I had any sympathy for the damn thing.

Sam's journal was nothing like that. It was a hard, black sucker, so clean and so organized that I was ten-pounds-of-positive Sam'd be having a seizure if she knew I was slurping noodle soup over it right now. In fact, if I hadn't already been clued in to what it was (and I hadn't read the text), I would've assumed the journal was some sort of scientific lab write-up 'cause that's the kind of professional it looked. Her handwriting sorta ruined it — the girl's scrawl could rival Dad's — but other than that, the book was as pristine as Mr. Clean's kitchen.

The thing must've taken her decades. But hey, not like she needed a life or anything.

Near the middle back of the O.C.D. Bible, the writing stopped and there were a few unfinished pages, so I was gonna cross my fingers that my deductive reasoning skills weren't as complete crap as the standardized test scores said they were, and that this was her current case. It was a couple o' vamps, hangin' about two hours west, right near the state border. There were the usual exsanguinated vics, and Sam had scouted out the area a few days back. According to her notes, she was "90% sure they're in the cream house with the gray shingles on Oneida Road," which was good enough for me. Hell, seventy percent was typically good enough for me. So, yeah, the hunt wasn't gonna be a problem… 'cause, I mean, vampires? Come on. Getting there was a bit more of an issue. Maybe I could stow away in Sam's trunk, watch her blow a gasket. That would be fun as long as it didn't end with a knife through my skull.

I decided that the possibility of that knife was a little too real, though, so I ended up hotwiring Rodney Parker's Toyota instead. Not like I had anything against the guy, but, seriously, he should've been thanking me for stealing this piece of crap. It was almost as gross as Sam's Volvo, and that was saying something. So it was, scowling behind the wheel of Rodney's disgrace to all vehicle-kind, that I inched up behind the equally disgraceful blue rat-nest that Sam called home and grumbled after her onto the highway, heading west away from the late morning sun. Actually, screw that, there was no sun to be seen. The sky looked like Mother Earth had put a big pot lid over the state — gonna cook herself some Cheeseheads! — by which I mean it looked flat and gray and distinctly sun-less. Overcast. It was November, you know, and, by-and-large, I was under the impression that November could go hang itself 'cause all it was was one, long, boring wait for snow. The sky was making like it was prepping for a blizzard, but it was bluffing, and I wasn't fooled. Like I said, November could go hang itself; the snow wasn't coming anywhere near the US-Canadian border until December and that was just fact. Didn't mean it wasn't kick-ass cold, though. It'd taken me six minutes to work out the heating system in Rodney's stupid car, and, in that time, I think I'd probably lost three toes and four odd fingers to frostbite (they still wouldn't bend), and it's not like I was dressed to show off my kneecaps or anything. I was hidden away under two shirts and two coats. When I glimpsed myself in the rearview mirror, I looked like the fucking Stay Puft Marshmallow Man from "Ghostbusters." Fantastic! Just the snot-flavored, frickin icing on the cake!

The scenery on this balmy, two-hour drive was exactly as stunningly gorgeous as the sky. Cow pastures... And more cow pastures. And it smelled simply divine. I hadn't cracked the window once ('cause, yeah, freezing), but the Toyota still reeked of manure. (Lesson to take to heart: you can't fight the cows). I never lost sight of Sam's Volvo, though, and I wondered if she was falling just as deeply in love with our bovine neighbors as I was. Then again, I guess she lived here; she was probably used to it and I was the only one suffering. Suffering all on my lonesome. Awesome. I sank ten fathoms deeper into my foul mood.

When we finally arrived at Middle-of-Nowhere Town Number Two, the house was just like she'd described in her notes: cream slatted sides, mildew-heavy gray shingles, dead-looking windows… all around ugly as hell. But a quick glance over at the passenger seat, where I'd buckled in my machete like it was my frail, elderly aunt, buoyed my mood a notch or two. Chopping off vampire heads wasn't such a bad way to spend an afternoon.

I just had one teensy little problem to deal with first.

Sam stopped right in front of the house, so I figured it was safe to conclude surprise wasn't a big element of her plan, and I parked about five feet behind her. There was no mistaking that gesture. She must've spied me through the rear window 'cause neither was there any confusion or fear on her face when she slammed out of her car, just anger. Oh yes, she was very angry.

…And she was coming right towards me.

I opened the door just as she started to spit, "The fuck d'you think you're doing here?"

"Hunting some vamps?" I tried, hoping we could lighten this up a bit. Right now her hostility was as dark as Joan Jett's makeup, and, even though Sam wasn't wearing makeup, her eyes were definitely channeling Joan. "Okay, look," I started again, wincing internally when I realized what a horrible opening line that was, "I… um…" I scratched my head (just to make myself look like more of an ape... so much for King of Charm). "I guess I'm here to tell you I'm sorry."

"You guess? You know what, _Dean_?" she said, hissing my name like it was a rattlesnake stuck in her hair or something. "You can take your apology, and you can shove it up your ass. Then you can get the hell out of here so that those of us who actually like to do things besides mess with other people's lives can get on with our jobs."

Ouch. But I wasn't gonna blow up at her. I guess I sorta deserved it… Only sorta, though.

"I _am_ sorry," I said, trying to give her my best innocent look. "I don't 'guess;' that was a dumb thing to say. This is just hard to do right. I'm not a word person and you are a word person, so that makes it harder, but, look, you gotta let me explain."

I could tell she didn't want to. Fuck, she probably wanted to take the machete that I suddenly realized was clamped pretty damn tight in her right hand and chop my head off. But she didn't do that either. She took a breath deep enough to make her breasts stick out an extra two inches, and she pursed her lips into that familiar pink scrunch of disapproval, and then she glared at me with a sharp silence that said, "Alright. I'm giving you a chance because I'm not a dick like you are, but unless this is really fucking good, I'm going to knock your teeth out."

I'll admit that my heartrate was jack-rabbiting, and this gross varnish of sweat had painted itself sloppily across my forehead. "I didn't mean what I said at Jacky's party," I told her, "Well, I meant some of it. But not like that. I mean—" I shook my head in the hopes that all the screws would fall into place and the words would just come 'cause I had a feeling I was already fucking this up pretty spectacularly. "—I just… I didn't mean to _leave_ like that. I… You have to understand that I don't stay places. My dad and I move everywhere. All the time. I never stay, and I didn't want to _want_ to stay because that makes it worse when I have to go. Um… but I guess I lost that battle because I _do_ want to stay, and… well… you know… Um… I want to stay because of you." I'd been looking at the window controls, but I risked a glance her way before hurrying on, "So I came to help you with this hunt. As an apology."

"For being a dick," she finished, and I couldn't stop myself from beaming at that 'cause I knew it meant she was gonna forgive me. Maybe not right away. But she was.

"Yeah," I said. "A foot-long dick."

"Okay. No need to get vivid. Just get out of the car and bring your dumb little knife," she ordered as she stepped away from the door. Then she made a face and added, "Whose car _is_ that anyway?"

"Uh… Rodney Parker's," I said, still beaming as I rushed to unbuckle my machete and follow her over the curb onto the house's overgrown lawn, which had long ago been colonized by the many descendants of Dandelion and Weed.

She snorted. "Your ethics astound me."

"Oh, come on, he could do with a new car."

"Whatever," she said. "You steal my journal, too? That how you found me?"

"Yeah," I admitted. "Vamps, right?"

"Right," she nodded. "Three of them, and since both the cars I saw last time are still here, I'm gonna go ahead and say it's a full house."

"Huh. Not super homey, though," I had to put in, giving the ratty exterior another good up-and-down, "These S.O.B.s seriously need to sit their asses down and watch some 'Home Improvement.'"

"Not sure exactly how to play this one," she carried on, ignoring my Oscar-winning attempts at comedy, 'cause apparently she wanted to talk business. Okay. I could get on board with that I guess; it was as good a place as any to start.

So I said, "Then we're just gonna bust in there, machetes waving?"

She flicked her chin and her briar-patch of hair back over her shoulder to give me the idiot look. "Oh yeah," she said, sarcasm slicing out from the crooked spots in her teeth. "Three to two. Sounds like a real winning strategy."

"Fine," I said, stiffening up and setting my lower lip in a pouty line, "So, tell me Miss Mathlete, what _is_ your game plan?"

"I'm working on it. You weren't in Plan A."

"But you're gonna tell me before you open the door, right?" 'Cause, I mean, we were only, like, thirty feet from the front porch now, and Sam was showing no signs of stopping.

She shrugged. "Sure. Um… You know what, let's do this…" and then the clouds parted and a ray of righteous sunlight shown down from the heavens and the brilliance of Sam was revealed to me.

We went to decapitate us some vamps. The blood-sucking bastards never knew what hit 'em.

…

When she separated the last sucker's head from its body, the juices of life sprayed in a broad, bloody arc.

"Ewww…You got some serious nasty on my shirt," I told her in an imitation of offense as I frowned at the offending line of red spots.

"Shut up," she snapped, "You've dealt with blood before, and right now you should be kissing my ass."

Now _that_ was too good of a setup _not_ to jump on. I fought my face into flatness before glancing over at her and saying, "I'm down."

I got an eye-roll in response, but I could see the corners of her mouth struggling to hook upwards. "Seriously, is _everything_ about sex to you?"

"Eh," I shrugged, "more or less."

She just shook her head, and when she didn't seem to be prepping any type of verbal response, I prompted, "So… ass kissing?"

"I don't answer to booty calls," she told me coolly, but her eyes were crooked into a warm crinkle that made me think the words were probably carved into something more like cookie dough than stone. I'd get there eventually.

"Well, fine," I said, "but you can't turn down coming back to shower at my place this time. Looks like somebody dumped a bag of muddy cats on your head… and not just any cats; we're talking seriously pissed-off cats, cats who did _not_ get their good-morning Friskies."

She made a face, and her mouth breezed into one of its ready-made silent sighs.

"That a 'yes'?" I grinned.

The look she was shooting me intensified, but finally she said, "Yeah, sure," with another eye-roll. "You win. But don't forget about the booty calls."

"Any other types of calls pass the mark?"

I got the idiot look again.

"Fine," I relented, "No calling of any kind. We're cool."

"Uh-huh," she said as she bent down to wipe her machete off on the decapitated vampire's shirt. "Just you remember it."

Cleaning my own blade against my already ruined jacket, I snorted, "Was that a threat?" making it obvious that I was teasing as I smirked back at her.

She stood back up and smacked me on the arm with the flat side of her knife. "Maybe it was. Can we get out of here? I feel like I stepped in a tub of grossness."

"Angry cats," I corrected her. "And yeah, you look it, too. I, on the other hand, look like a freshly blossomed peony."

"You do not," she sneered, shoving me in the direction of the door.

I let her push me forward, but I raised a finger over my shoulder so she could see it as I added, "_And_ I smell like one."

"You smell like puke."

"_You_ smell like puke."

"Just get in the car."

"I _am_ getting in the car. Geez. No need to be bossy."

"You like it that I'm bossy."

"Huh," I snorted as my butt hit the passenger's seat. That, for one, was true.

"And don't get blood on the upholstery," she commanded as she plopped beside me behind the wheel.

"Honey," I couldn't resist from smirking, "in this car it'd probably be an improvement."

She turned on the radio to drown me out, but I could still hear her mutter, "I like my car," under the characteristic refrain of "Man! I Feel Like a Woman."

I let it go, forgot that I hated this song, and watched the gorgeous cow pastures of western Wisconsin roll past. Had I thought they were ugly before? Smelled bad? Huh. Well, maybe they were only gorgeous now in comparison to the interior of Sam's car, but, you know, I'd take what I could get.

…

Sam gave me a scathing look when I tried to give her directions to my place. She already knew where I lived. Duh. And although I'd been giving her crap the whole way about driving like an epileptic old lady, she pulled up beside the curb just ten after 3:00, so, in the privacy of my own brain, I can admit that my complaints were unfounded.

Still, even though we were good now, the first words out of her mouth once the wheels had frozen into their sedentary and locked position were, "Where's the shower?"

I tossed off the seatbelt, saying, "Uh-uh. Who said you get to go first?"

She shoved out of the car, marched around to my side, and gave me a look. "I'm a girl, which means I actually care about hygiene. Also, I killed more vampires—"

"You did not!"

She held up a finger and ignored me. "—I killed more vampires. _And_ I have to get out of here before the corner store closes because I'm supposed to pick up eggs on my way home."

"Oh. Well, in that case," I said sarcastically, "go right ahead."

"Thanks. So… Shower. Where is it?"

"Well, for starters, it's in the house." I began walking towards the front door, listening with great satisfaction to the light thumping of her boots on the path behind me, even though I knew she was doing her silent sigh thing where I couldn't see. I dug the key out of my pocket and got us into the living room before pointing up the stairs and saying, "Shower's up there. On the left. And — I can't believe I'm offering this — but do you want me to throw your clothes in with mine?"

She was already tromping up the stairs, and she didn't turn back around as she said, "Oh yes, definitely. Can't exactly go home naked. I'll leave them in the hall."

I was torn between saying that it was fine with me if she went home naked; that, wow, I'd forgotten how much of a total bitch she could be; that, no, I wasn't her maid and I wasn't gonna go collect her clothes from the upstairs hallway; and that never again was I gonna be offering her laundry services. But, being so torn, and with part of my brain stuck on the side-to-side click of her ass as she clopped up the last couple steps, I ended up just saying, "Mmmmmh," instead. I've got no clue what she made of that, but she gave me a final eye-roll as she disappeared around the stairwell, so she must've at least heard.

I didn't bother to tell her that her egg-shopping point was kaput if I was gonna be washing her clothes 'cause it would take just shy of two hours for the whole cycle to complete, drying and all, and the store closed early on weekends. No eggs would be bought tonight. But I figured she could work that out for herself. What maybe she'd failed to work out (despite that lawyer/doctor/senator/whatnot brain of hers) was that, with the cycle taking just shy of two hours, and the average shower time at around fifteen minutes, she was gonna be clean long before her clothes were. An interesting dilemma, one which I found a bit more fascinating than I probably should've. It was while I was thinking this that I heard the squeak of the shower knobs being turned, and then the angry, serpentine hiss of the water as each droplet fought to be first out of the pipes. The little suckers should cool it; all they were gonna find in the brave new world was the drain, followed by more pipes, which definitely couldn't be a water droplet's definition of a life well-spent… but then it struck me like a war-club to the head that, first, they would get to meet Sam in an unusually up-close and personal way. Live fast. Die young. Maybe it wouldn't be so bad to be a water droplet.

I didn't get totally lost in my deep, philosophical musings, though. (Ha. Did I ever?) When I figured Sam'd had enough time to dump her clothes out, I climbed the stairs and tiptoed along the carpeted stretch of hallway that led to the bathroom. She was humming "Back 2 Good," not exactly matching any steady tempo because each bout of humming inevitably got interrupted by a splatter of water, but still recognizable. And, no surprise ('cause no musician has been blessed with any type of sense since '86) Matchbox 20 had it all wrong. They could bitch about their relationship problems if they wanted, but I wasn't gonna be listening, 'cause for me, things _were_ 'back to good.'

Which is why — much as certain parts of my body were screaming, "Come on, do it!" — I couldn't risk screwing up my lucky streak by opening the door and taking a quick peak. I mean, seriously, there'd be no harm in that, right? But I was suppressing my nature and playing it safe for once.

…No one had ever made a law against fantasizing, though.

And I knew exactly what it'd be like. The room would be steamy and hot and wet 'cause, nice as this house was, it didn't have an overhead vent, and Sam would also be steamy and hot and wet… and so very, very naked. Yes, very naked. That happened when people showered. But I figured most people couldn't really be naked like _Sam_ could be naked 'cause most people weren't… well… they weren't Sam. Sam had that Mediterranean skin, golden-glowy like Italian paintings, and dotted with little chocolate-chip moles, just here and there, tastefully placed. Mediterranean skin. Mmmmh. People from the Mediterranean were never meant to put on clothing; they don't teach you that in school, but it's true. God had it in mind when he invented them. From Libya to Spain to Croatia, all that skin was meant to show day-in-day-out from January to December, bared for the sun to kiss and stroke. I didn't really know where Sam's family was from, but I knew the sun wanted to elope with her skin, too, 'cause, God, I did. And when she was naked there would be so much of it. I'd only ever seen patches: face, hands, forearms, neck… but all of it? No, she definitely wasn't meant to wear clothes.

That brought me back to the present 'cause I was there, after all, to collect her bloody shirt and pants and stuff. She was still humming "Back 2 Good," but I wasn't sure her hummy mood would hold if she realized I was standing right outside getting kinda tight in my jeans. That would be awkward, so I scooped up the pile of limp cloth, carefully _not_ looking for undergarments, and tromped back down to floor one. There was no basement; the laundry room was on the first floor next to the guest bedroom Dad'd been using, and so (big shocker) that's where I went. I ditched the heap on the damp cement slab of the floor, a few feet in front of the washer and dryer. I mean, no way was I doing two loads; Sam's jeans could hold their horses until my clothes were ready to join the mess.

Two-hour cycle plus Sam's twenty-minute shower plus my ten-minute shower plus a couple minutes for transferring things equaled a long damn time.

Sam was gonna be going home late.

Not so strangely, that thought didn't bother me.

So, still wearing my own evidence of slaughter and success, I went to stand in the living room to wait and tried not to get myself too hot and bothered by picturing showering Sam.

It was ten minutes later that I finally heard the water thunk off, the dull echo of it resounding through the walls, carried by the pipes. As the echo died, the friction sound of rubber on asphalt plopped into its vacated spot: probably a car stopping somewhere along the street. Then the neighbor's dog started to bark, which was frustrating 'cause I was tryna listen to what was going on upstairs. And there, aha. The bathroom door squeaked open, the bottom of it brushing over the plush top of the carpet like a contained sample of the wind through a grassland. Sam's feet began to pad softly overhead. Step, step, step, pause. Step, step. My ceiling, her floor, groaned quietly, and then all of that was drowned out by heavier footsteps. Footsteps coming from outside. And getting closer.

For a moment, my brain stalled. Who the hell would be turning up at 3:30 on a Saturday? But then, with a silent "Oh" of horror, it put the pieces together.

My stomach tried to run out of my abdomen (stupid thing to do), but the rest of my body suddenly felt very heavy and slow. This was bad… and I had no ideas about how to make it better.

"Dean?" Sam's voice echoed down the staircase, and my head turned automatically. God, she was gorgeous.

"Um…" I said brilliantly as my mind split itself between Sam in towel, and the scratchy noises of a key jabbing its way into the lock, and oh shit.

It didn't matter what I said, though, because Sam must've heard the lock clicking into place and her head snapped up with wide, hunt-ready eyes. And then the door was opening and my dad was grunting something to someone else that sounded like, "oven," or maybe "up in," but who the fuck cared? And then he and Bobby were standing in the entryway and staring at me with weird expressions, which I guess was deserved because I must've looked like I'd been hit by a semi doing seventy. And then Sam made some little surprised inhalation noise, and Dad and Bobby snapped their heads up the staircase to where she was standing in her lavender-colored towel, dripping on the carpet like the best razor commercial since the dawn of television, and I said: "Um… Welcome back."


	9. You Can't Have it All

**Hey y'all. Geez it's been a long time. Okay, so, apologies as always. I know it's getting old, but life can be a busy thing. If you read my other stories you might've heard this already, but posting is most likely going to be very slow. You know how I promised an update in June and it's just getting here now? That's the kind of slow I'm talking. I'm going to try to get better, but I just moved across the country and am starting at a new college (first time posting from the east coast :D), so you can imagine that there's a lotta stuff to deal with in my real world life. Anyway, thank you so, so much to those of you who are still reading this. You guys are amazing! And without further ado, here's the chapter...**

* * *

CHAPTER 9: YOU CAN'T HAVE IT ALL  


"What the hell, Dean!" Dad exploded, "I gave you one rule!"

I could see Bobby shuffling awkwardly behind him, glancing from Dad to Sam and back again, but I didn't pay him much mind because I had to deal with the dark and glowering hulk of a man who had spawned me.

"Excuse me?" I shot back (because that was fucking ridiculous), "You told me not to blow up the oven."

"Which meant this!" He gestured roughly towards Sam, who was still at the top of the stairs, clinging to her towel as if it was the last lifeboat leaving the Titanic.

"It did not!"

"Don't talk back to me."

"I'm not talking back! Just, seriously, Dad, how the hell was I supposed to know _this_ is what you meant by 'don't blow up the oven?' Sam's not exactly an oven. And I didn't blow her up."

"You didn't?"

"Oh my god, Dad, please don't go there."

"Well?"

"No, okay! There was no... blowing... Of any kind!"

"Jesus, Dean. I don't mind if you screw around, but _not_ in the house."

"There was no 'screwing around!'" I insisted. (Real men don't blush, but I'll admit that my face was a bit hot.) "Can we please, _please_, not have this conversation?"

"We can 'not have this conversation' when there isn't a half-naked girl in a towel on our staircase." He crossed his arms over his chest and cocked an eyebrow, looking like nothing more than an angry slab of meat, and no matter how hard he glared, I wasn't going to let myself be defeated by any slab of meat.

"She showered! We…"

"You what?"

"Nothing! We were out together. She got muddy—" And bloody, but he didn't need to hear that one. "—so I said she could shower here. Notice how I'm all covered in dirt, too?"

Glancing over at Bobby, I saw that he was focused on the top of the staircase. I turned my head to get Sam in my field of vision and realized from the way that she was subtly moving her free hand that they were having some sort of silent conversation while Dad and I argued. Sneaky bastards.

Sure enough, just as Dad opened his mouth to unleash his next commandment (undoubtedly something so brilliant that time itself would stop to applaud), Bobby interrupted with a gruff, "Hate to break up this little reunion, but if neither of you've noticed, our lady guest could use some clothes."

Sometimes I wanted to kiss Bobby.

Dad's dark eyes flicked up Sam's way briefly, his arms twisting ever more tightly together. He clearly didn't like the change of topic, but, unwilling to lose control of the conversation, took the opportunity to snap, "Dean, get her something to put on. Then I want both of you in the kitchen, and we're gonna have a talk." He glared at me again before marching towards the yellow-walled domain of the fridge and stove as if I'd personally torched her whole wardrobe just so she'd have to wear a towel. Well... maybe I would've... but that had nothing to do with the situation at hand.

Bobby jogged his eyebrows in an unreadable gesture and touched his hat as he glanced up Sam's way again. Then, impossibly quietly for a man his size, he followed Dad through the rectangular mouth of the doorway and disappeared.

"Shit," I said.

"Maybe I should leave," said Sam.

"Oh God, please no. He'll tear me apart."

A small smile tugged at the corner of her mouth, which she quickly fought down. "We'll see. I have my own parents to tear me apart when I get home in someone else's clothes, and, about that, I honestly don't think your pants are gonna fit over my hips."

Despite the situation, I let out the grin that was itching at my tongue. "You mean your ass. And who said I was lending you clothes?" Not that I was at all opposed to the idea.

She just snorted and waited for me to get to the top of the staircase. "Don't judge my room," I told her as I swept past, leading her down the short hallway towards the entrance to my lair. Not like there was really anything wrong with my room, but I hadn't expected her to be seeing it this soon, so I wasn't totally sure what gross stuff I might've left lying out. Socks. Underwear. Sweat-stained shirts. Old, fast-food, take-out containers. The possibilities were endless if you think about it, and some of them quite frightening.

When I peered through the open doorway, though, it wasn't really all that bad. It smelled a bit like general, lived-in grossness (because I'd lived in it, okay?), and there was definitely some shit lying around on the floor. The two potted plants (which, by the way, had been there before I set up camp) had long ago called it quits and went to meet their maker, but that was hardly _my_ fault. All around a bit shabby, but it'd do.

"Are you gonna let me in?"

Right. I was blocking the entrance. I shot her a scowl over my shoulder and slipped inside, immediately heading for the wall where I'd piled my clean clothes. I don't _do_ drawers. I bent down and dug for something passable. Of course, there was no helping the fact that she'd have to go commando 'cause I didn't keep bras and panties around, and, even if I did, there was no way I would've let her know that. But I couldn't focus all my attention on searching when I knew she was right behind me, managing to survey my room with the air of a professional interior designer even when she was only wearing a towel dress.

"So," she said as she completed her three-sixty-degree spin, "This is the monkey's treehouse."

"The monkey's lair," I corrected as I tossed my smallest and least ratty T-shirt onto the bed behind me. "See if that works."

"Okay." I heard the rumple of cloth as she pulled off the towel, probably to retie it around her waist, but I couldn't look. I swallowed instead and hunched lower over my pile of clothes. Still needed some pants. Pants. Jeans were out. Only sweats were gonna fit over her butt, which, yes, I knew from accumulated hours of examination. Uncovering a pair of gray ones at last, I tossed that behind me, too, and straightened.

"Keep facing the wall," she commanded.

I held my breath and did, listening to the _thlump_ as the towel slid off her hips and crumpled to my floor. I could stash the towel away later; make sure Dad didn't wash it or burn it or throw it to the dogs or whatever other method he might have planned out for its demise. One way or another, though, I was gonna make sure we kept that towel, even if I had to slip it under my mattress like some obsessed serial killer; the towel was staying.

"Okay, I'm good," Sam said, and I turned towards her with a roll of my eyes for the ceiling.

"Prude."

She scrunched her nose at me but didn't lash back. Instead she said, "I don't think I can stay. Aside from how seriously scary your dad is and how seriously pissed off my parents are gonna be, I can't go talk to two adult guys wearing this." She pointed towards her chest with one sharp index finger.

"Why not?" I asked as I scanned her up and down, from the extra-long sweats that pooled around her feet, letting only her toes peek out, to where it all hung too loose around her waist, to— "Oh."

In my peripheral vision, I could tell her cheeks had gone Princess-Peach-colored, but my eyes were mostly focused on her chest. Commando didn't work so well with girls who were as… 'well-endowed' as Sam was. Not that I was complaining, but I wholly agreed that she wasn't gonna be talking to Dad and Bobby like that. That'd be seriously freakin' awkward, and it would probably make the two of them seem like pedophiles or something 'cause no way could they entirely avoid staring at her boobs when they were just so… obvious.

Sam crossed her arms over her chest. "Dean," she said.

"Yep." My eyes flicked up to her face, which was aflame under its tan.

"Just 'cause we're good now doesn't mean you don't have to keep your eyes above neck-level."

"'Kay."

She quirked one side of her mouth at me even though her face was still on fire and cocked her head to the side. There was a muted chaffing sound as the heavy, wet curtains of her hair slipped across her shoulders. "What happened to all your witty comebacks?"

"I've got a lot to process," I defended myself, which was true. Dad. Bobby. Sam. Sam's boobs. Major shit that was about to hit the fan. Just a few things. "I can't be a genius day-in day-out. My brain needs a refractory period."

Her smile grew. "Alright," she said, taking a step towards me, "Stalk me down again when you've recovered from your big mental workout."

I would've said something brilliant back, something that would've blown her mind, but she chose that moment to step even closer, so that there was no doubt about whether or not she was in my personal bubble, and then her lips were touching the corner of my mouth: warm and damp from the shower (or maybe from saliva), the texture rougher than most girls who'd kissed me but the touch itself lighter, softer, briefer. Wet strands of hair tickled my neck, and then they were gone. It was over before my lazy-ass brain had even fully computed what was happening.

She pulled back and turned around, only giving me a split second to catalogue the way her mouth curved at one corner, the way the pinkness still clung to her cheeks, before she was swooping her hips around my door frame with the single, totally inadequate word, "Bye," and I was left staring at the space she'd just occupied like I was the ugly duckling and no one had ever kissed me before. For Christ's sake, she hadn't even kissed my mouth really; it was ridiculous.

I shook my head stupidly, completing the wet-dog embodiment of the loser that I was, and stumbled out of my room towards the staircase just in time to see the door shut behind her. I grinned at it like an idiot for a second before I remembered that she'd just ditched me in a really crappy situation. Bitch. Except I totally forgave her now. Still, I had a bit of a crap platter on my hands, and putting it off would only make it worse, so I rolled out my shoulders and toed down the stairs to the kitchen where Bobby was seated at the little table. Dad was leaning against the refrigerator. They both looked like wax sculptures in the whitish lighting, Bobby hunched and staring at the plate I'd left out from breakfast with an unnecessary amount of determination, Dad stiff, arms suctioned across his chest like a large, ticked-off squid.

"Sam left," I said.

"We heard," Dad informed me. He wasn't happy (which, of course, came as a huge surprise).

I took the seat across from Bobby, the left-over plate staring blindly at the ceiling between us, and waited for Dad to work himself up to it.

It didn't take long.

"What happened?"

"Nothing."

"Nothing?" Dad had that really irritating expression on his face that all parents mastered at some point back in the stone age: the amused, condescending, I-can't-take-you-seriously expression. It made me want to punch him. "Dean, you're covered in dirt. You don't get covered in dirt doing nothing."

"It was a hunt, okay? We went on a hunt together."

"You— What?"

"We went on a hunt. Sam's a hunter; I'm a hunter, so we teamed up to take out a couple vampires." They didn't need to know the details.

"You just hooked up with a random hunter and took off and didn't even bother to call to let me know that you were doing something incredibly stupid that might get you killed and to not necessarily expect you here when I got back?"

"Sam's not some random hunter," I protested, ignoring the rest of what he'd said because I didn't exactly have a retort for that. "This isn't the first time we've hunted together."

Oh… Well shit. Had I really just said that? Sometimes I wanted to lock my brain in a steal box and let it think about its actions.

"Excuse me?" Dad demanded. The condescending look was gone, and, even though it'd been replaced by straight-up anger, I gotta say that that was better. He pushed off the refrigerator and glided over the tiles to tower behind Bobby, arms still twined together. Bobby glanced over his shoulder at him.

"John," he grumbled, "Dean's seventeen."

From his tone, I could tell that he didn't mean, "Dean's seventeen so he's mature enough to be able to make his own decisions." He meant, "Dean's seventeen so it's inevitable that he's gonna do a lotta pigheaded things."

"Thanks Bobby," I snorted.

"Dean, drop the attitude," Dad growled. "You're telling me that you've gone on two hunts with this girl, and you didn't tell me about either of them?"

"Yeah," I said, the insolence in my tone still burning hot. I did feel guilty underneath. I mean, I'm not a complete idiot; I knew I should've told him, but the way he was talking to me had the anger dashing to the surface, so, no, I wasn't gonna drop the attitude. "And looky here: I'm still alive and so is she!"

"That's not the point! The point is—" He stopped himself and visibly schooled down the storm cloud of rage swarming about his ears. "What did you hunt?"

Fuck. Did not wanna go there. But it was time to come clean. Just a few more seconds of stalling. "I already said it was vamps."

"Both times?"

"No… Um…" I looked at the plate of egg residue that Bobby had been eyeing earlier. "The first time was a witch."

"A witch. Not the witch I've spent the past month looking for. Couldn't be that witch."

I continued to stare at the egg plate.

Dad took another couple moments to cool his fury. "Why wouldn't you tell me?"

I spoke to the plate, trying to blank out my expression. I kick ass at poker, but I couldn't quite pull off the face right then; my muscles had a mind of their own and that mind was a tense one. "If you'd known it was over, you would've packed us up and on to the next hunt in two seconds flat."

"I thought you hated it here."

"Wouldn't be the first time you weren't one-hundred-percent correct."

He sucked in another controlled breath, the front of his shirt swelling in my peripheral vision until I was sure his ribs were gonna pop. But then he forcibly expelled it. "And what caused this sudden change of heart?"

Bobby made his presence known again when he coughed and cut in with an apologetic, "Ain't that kinda obvious?"

"What, the girl?"

"And other things," I protested. I couldn't have them thinking I was some kind of hopeless romantic after all. I mean, I _wasn't_ some kind of hopeless romantic.

"Dean," Dad sighed. He scrubbed a hand over his stubble. "We can't stay in one place. There are people's lives out there for us to protect, and we can't do that if we settle down in one tiny town in the middle of nowhere."

"Sam manages," I grumbled.

"She'd manage better if she moved."

Bobby lifted his hat to scratch at his hairline, refocusing on the egg plate as he said, "Your daddy's right, Dean. I'm not sayin' there ain't hunts around here, but if you wanna really help folks, you gotta go where the situation's worst, and that sure as hell ain't Tinyville, Wisconsin."

Traitor. I stared daggers at his baseball cap. "I'm not leaving."

Dad had never been good at handling defiance. He spun away towards the fridge, and the air he' been trying so hard to control fled his chest in one, roaring tidal wave. "This isn't up for discussion. We're leaving. Now. And one day you'll understand why it's the right thing to do." He turned so that only the profile of his face was visible, cutting a sharp silhouette against the white of the fridge door. "Bobby, I'm sorry for calling you out here for nothing. We'll stop by the junkyard sometime."

Bobby knew a dismissal when he heard one. Glancing between Dad and me, he pushed out of his chair with a grumbled, "You better bring a casserole," and began a self-conscious amble around the table.

If I hadn't been so ticked off with him, I would've rolled my eyes. As it was, he just got more of the glare.

"Kid," he mumbled to me as he stood fingering the brim of his hat, "there's a lotta girls out there. You'll meet another one."

Letting go of the hat, he reached to pat my shoulder, and I let him, but my eyebrows climbed, and I didn't break eye-contact as I said, "Another girl my age who I like, likes me, and who, not only do I not have to lie about my life to, but who can actually be an active part of it? You know that's crap."

Bobby tipped his head to the side in a gesture that could've meant anything and paused for a moment. I could tell he was contemplating saying more. He didn't, though, and a second later he turned to slouch out of the kitchen. I watched the wrinkles of his vest back as they passed through the frame, and Dad and I both stood in a spell of silence until there came the whoosh and snick of the front door closing. Then Dad turned to face me head on.

No eye contact. "Go pack," he ordered. "We're heading out in thirty."

I stared at his face for a moment, daring him to look. But he didn't. He stood strong and still and unfeeling until the moment I marched out and up the stairs to my room. If he wanted me to pack, fine; I'd pack. But if he thought I was getting in the Impala with him, he had another thing coming.


End file.
